Dune: Prophecy Trailer Spices Up HBO

Television

A sandworm is coming for streaming this year. Today, HBO released a trailer for Dune: Prophecy, the upcoming prequel series to Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novels. Set 10,000 years before Dune, Dune: Prophecy reveals the origins of the Bene Gesserit, the order of women who manipulate the Empire in their quest to decide the future of humanity. Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Jodhi May, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, and Mark Strong star in the series, which is not an adaptation of any of Frank Herbert’s books, although it is based on one of his son’s continuation novels, Sisterhood of Dune. Alison Schapker serves as showrunner, but Denis Villeneuve is not involved with the series. Dune: Prophecy premieres on HBO Max in the fall of 2024, and you can see the trailer below:

I’m highly skeptical of Dune: Prophecy. I like Villeneuve’s Dune films very much, but he has nothing to do with the show, and while one of the movies’ writers, Jon Spaihts, was initially the showrunner, he was fired because Legendary didn’t like the direction in which he took the series. In other words, none of the people responsible for the movies are involved. Moreover, before he got the boot, Spaihts was given a co-showrunner in Dana Calvo because certain websites complained that the show didn’t have enough women involved in a creative capacity. Calvo is no longer a showrunner, nor is her and Spaihts’ replacement, Diane Ademu-John, who was co-showrunner with Alison Schapker, who is now the sole showrunner. They got rid of the guy who wrote the two movies pretty much everyone seems to like for a revolving door of replacements, eventually settling on one who worked extensively with Bad Robot. This show looks like a particularly troubled production.

Aside from that, I don’t care for prequels. They’re unnecessary (if they were necessary, the stories to which they are preludes wouldn’t have worked), and they exist to establish the status quo, meaning there are rarely any stakes or a reason to get invested in them. The Bene Gesserit are interesting in part because they’re so mysterious, and I enjoy finding out bits and pieces about them in the main story. A cheat sheet just detracts from that aura of intrigue, dragging what was intriguingly in the shadows into the light. Additionally, this story is not based on Frank Herbert’s work but on his son’s continuation novels. If you’ve never read continuation novels, they’re usually bad, and I don’t like that we’re getting what is, at best, apocryphal adaptations before the next of Herbert’s books becomes a movie. “You’re going to have to wait a few years to see where Paul Atreides goes next, but here’s where his mom’s friends came from.” Swell.

However, I’m not saying Dune: Prophecy is definitely going to be bad. I like the look of the show in the trailer, and they at least try to keep it in line with Villeneuve’s films. I like some of the actors and actresses in it, especially Olivia Williams and Mark Strong. And while Alison Schapker has some not-so-hot credits (she wrote for Alias, but not when it was good; she wrote for Westworld, but not when it was good), she did write a few episodes of The Flash during its great first season, and she wrote some early episodes of Lost. Maybe she and the other writers can tell a compelling story set in the Dune universe.