First ‘Dune Part II’ Poster Centers Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, Trailer Arrives Wednesday

Warner Bros. Discovery has released the first theatrical poster for “Dune Part II,” with the first trailer dropping on Wednesday morning. The poster simply offers a vast desert vista with its two young leads, Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya standing with weapons raised against the blazing sun.

The film will be the second half of a two-part theatrical adaptation of Frank Herbert’s first 500-page tome, and will again feature Chalamet and Zendaya alongside the likes of Javier Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson and Josh Brolin. New cast members Christopher Walken and Florence Pugh, although it can be presumed that some major characters who died in the last movie, such as Oscar Issac’s saintly patriarch, may pop up in flashbacks.

The film, again directed by Denis Villeneuve and adapted for the screen by Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, opens Nov. 3, where it will essentially kick off the year-end holiday blitz all the way through New Year’s Day.

The first “Dune” earned rave reviews and won six Oscars while grossing $110 million domestically and $402 million worldwide. Sans COVID-related variables, and whatever lost viewership occurred due to concurrent HBO Max availability in North America, that might have been a disappointing figure for a $165 million sci-fi epic.

However, the film was seen as a commercial success, at least over the long term, with the hope that the sequel would build on that gross both due to the first film’s relative popularity and a return to more conventional theatrical windows. Whether the film would have earned more in non-COVID and non-Project Popcorn times is an open question, as the likes of “The Conjuring 3” and “Godzilla vs. Kong.” earned on par with or better than what might have been expected in conventional circumstances.

History shows that the “part II” of a well-received “part I” will out-earn its predecessor. Think “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” or the last two “Avengers” movies. That’s also good news for the two-part finales, both beginning this summer, of “Fast and the Furious” and “Mission: Impossible.”

However, “Dune Part II” is not the finale of a long-running cinematic saga, but rather just a very long book that was divided into two long movies. There isn’t a lot of cinematic precedent for a franchise beginning with a two-part saga, which will make this film’s performance something of a test case for Universal’s two-part “Wicked.”

Watch a short teaser for the “Dune 2” trailer below.

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‘Dune: Part Two': Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya and Denis Villeneuve Introduce First Look