Theaters are beginning to make their first tentative steps towards returning to business as usual, although they aren’t going to have as many movies to show as they typically do during the summer months given that the vast majority of Hollywood’s high-profile releases have been shifted back as the Coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the industry.
One of the only major holdouts has been Christopher Nolan’s massively-anticipated Tenet, with the filmmaker adamant that his next original epic will be unleashed in July. Understandably, the studio are said to be a little concerned about the potential loss in revenue, so as a test run of sorts, Warner Bros. will soon be re-releasing Nolan’s Inception to coincide with the movie’s ten-year anniversary.
In order to convince some of the more skeptical audiences to head back to their local cinema, the re-release will come attached with exclusive footage from several of their highest-profile upcoming titles. We previously brought the news that the first look at Godzilla vs. Kong would screen before Inception, and the first official glimpse of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune has also been confirmed.
Warner Bros. have an awful lot riding on Dune, given that the previous attempt at adapting Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi was a huge box office bomb that was subjected to heavy studio interference, and Villeneuve’s movie will only tell half of the story and save the rest for a potential sequel.
The filmmaker is without a doubt one of the best visual storytellers working today, but you can never predict how receptive audiences will be to such layered and complex sci-fi as evidenced by Villeneuve’s own Blade Runner 2049, which received widespread critical acclaim as a worthy sequel to an all-time classic but still ended up disappointing at the box office, and to the uninitiated, Dune is a lot less accessible than a dystopian blockbuster headlined by Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford.