Power Has a Price in First Teaser for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three”
The first teaser for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three has arrived. This riveting glimpse follows the release of brand-new character posters that reveal a transformed Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), who seems to have aged by both the burden of becoming Emperor at the end of Part Two and by the battles he’s waged and endured since. Visibly older and scarred, these first glimpses showed the prices the one-time princeling of House Atreides has paid for becoming the Messiah of the Fremen and the conqueror of the enemies who plotted against and murdered his father, Duke (Oscar Isaac) in Part One—specifically Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and then, in short order, both Austin Butler’s sociopathic Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen and toppling the reign of Christopher Walken’s feckless Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV after defeating Feyd-Rautha and negotiating a political marriage to the former Emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh).
The teaser gives a sense of the ambitious scale of Villeneuve’s third and final Dune film, one he has stressed isn’t really the third film in a trilogy but rather a new film that will stand on its own (despite being called Dune: Part Three). Here’s how Villeneuve explained it to Vanity Fair: “It was really a diptych. It was really a pair of movies that will be the adaptation of the first book. That’s done, and that’s finished. If I do a third one, which is in the writing process, it’s not like a trilogy. It’s strange to say that, but if I go back there, it’s to do something that feels different and has its own identity.”
The trailer opens on the now familiar sights of the spice-rich sands of Arrakis, with Chani (Zendaya) reclining in Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) arms, asking, “If we have a girl, what will we name her?” Paul answers, “Her name should be Ghanima; she will need to be strong, like her mother.” Then, when Paul asks what they should name their child if it’s a boy, Chani says, “Leto, so he would have the wisdom…of his grandfather.”
This remark definitely stings, as their potential son’s grandfather, the late Duke Atreides (Oscar Isaac), was the person who put Paul in the position he’s in now when he moved House Atreides to Arrakis, leading to Duke’s murder and Paul’s ascension to a messiah of the Fremen and the eventual emperor. We cut from the gauzy images of Paul and Chani in a tent, both looking young and very much in love, to a much grimier, older Paul, in full combat gear, looking nothing like the young man we met in Dune: Part One. “The more I fight,” Paul tells his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), “the more enemies fight back.” We get a glimpse of Pattinson’s Scytale, the shapeshifting villain, and armies fighting and killing each other.
“How did father do it?” Paul asks Lady Jessica.
“Your father never started a war,” she replies.
Check out the teaser below. Dune: Part Three is set to hit theaters on December 18, 2026.
