Here's a first look at Dune: Prophecy

Earlier this year, Denis Villeneuve released the second part of his adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, and later this year, we'll be headed back to the same universe with a new story, Dune: Prophecy, a six-episode streaming series on Max.

Based off of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's novel Sisterhood of Dune, it'll follow two sisters as they work to set up a sisterhood to help preserve humanity against a variety of different threats. That sisterhood will eventually become known as the Bene Gesserit, a powerful order of women who, by the time the events in Dune roll around, have been directing the course of humanity through various political machinations and alliances.

Here's the first trailer for the show:

It's been apparent for a short while that Warner Bros. has some high hopes for what it can do with the Dune franchise, and I've often thought that it's likely something that the studio can claim as its own counter to Disney's Star Wars and Paramount's Star Trek. Back in 2019, the studio announced that it had greenlit a series called Dune: The Sisterhood with Villeneuve set to direct.

The project has morphed and changed a bit since then: it lost its main writer John Spaihts and picked up a new showrunner in the form of Diane Ademu-John, who then left, leaving co-showrunner Alison Schapker to oversee the project. In 2022, Warner Bros. tapped Johan Reneck (Chernobyl) to direct, and a year later, he left (along with one of the lead actresses, Shirley Henderson) as the series underwent a creative retooling. Somewhere along the way, it was retitled to Dune: Prophecy.

After watching Dune: Part 2, I can see why Warner Bros. would be interested in this particular story to build on the films: the Bene Gesserit play a huge role in the momentum of Dune (and in Dune: Messiah.) While Herbert wrote six novels, his son Brian and co-author Kevin J. Anderson have vastly expanded the world with dozens of additional books that fill in various gaps in the story, exploring the worlds of the great houses, finishing Herbert's unfinished "final" novel, and generally keeping the universe going for those that want to keep up with the story.

In 2002, the pair kicked off the Legends of Dune trilogy (The Butlerian Jihad, The Machine Crusade, and The Battle of Corrin) that explored the events of the Butlerian Jihad, a massive revolution against artificial intelligence that took place 10,000 years before Dune, and followed it up a decade later with their Great Schools of Dune trilogy (Sisterhood of Dune, Mentats of Dune, and Navigators of Dune), again set centuries prior to the events of the original novel. It looks as though this show is based off of Sisterhood of Dune, and even if it isn't a direct adaptation, it seems likely that it's covering some of the same ground.

Herbert and Anderson's books have a mixed reputation: there's a legion of superfans out there who keep buying them in enough numbers to generally get them up onto bestseller lists, but other fans point to the quality of their writing and the general question of whether or not the books are warranted.

Whether or not those are valid arguments (I read Butlerian Jihad years and years ago, but don't remember much from it), I think it's reasonable to argue that their efforts have kept Dune in the minds of readers and on bookstore shelves, rather than resting and coasting on the sales and reputation of a sixty-year-old novel. If anything, they show that the world of Dune is vast and that there are plenty of stories that they can tell around the film franchise. Should this be a success, I can imagine that we'll see them continue the show and explore other possibilities up and down the timeline.

In a lot of ways, this show will supplement the film franchise by keeping fans engaged with the world by providing them with new content and lore to dig into, while also to enticing viewers to sign up for the various streaming services that are out there.

This is a familiar playbook at this point, especially at Warner Bros. Following the ending of its hit series Game of Thrones, it launched a prequel called The House of the Dragon in 2022 (its second season arrives in June) while also putting into development a range of additional adaptations from the same world. This also isn't limited to Warner Bros.: AMC has released countless installments of The Walking Dead franchise, while Disney has released a number of Star Wars shows, and so forth.

Will this series be any good? Time will tell. Villeneuve did some impressive work adapting the novel, helped in no small part by the film's design and art departments, who fleshed out the world in a significant way, and hopefully, this series will follow some of that underlying design to keep things congruent.

There are some risks, however. Despite being tapped to direct part of the series, Villeneuve doesn't appear to be involved in this project at any level, and so it'll be interesting to see how well these two adaptations will work together. Without a single person overseeing the larger franchise (think Kevin Feige at Marvel, James Gunn/Peter Safran at DC, Dave Filoni at Lucasfilm, or Alex Kurtzman at Paramount), Warner Bros. runs the risk of putting out a disjointed or scattered franchise.

It'll likely be a while before we see Dune: Messiah materialize. In addition to that, Villeneuve has an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War: A Scenario, and Cleopatra on his plate. This series will fill some of that time while we wait to return to Arakis and its characters. We won't have long to wait: the series is slated to drop on Max sometime this fall.