Nowadays it isn’t easy to get people to sit down for an over-two-hour film. Only a few brave cinephiles are able to dive straight into films like Gone with the Wind or Once Upon a Time in America – the bravest among them do it in one sitting.
But for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, most people, who otherwise would think twice about sitting down for an over-two-hour-long cinematic experience, are willing to open an exception. Sure, neither Part One is, nor Part Two will be, nearly as long as the two aforementioned classics. Their length nonetheless challenges our current cultural economy of attention. That being said, it’s clear from box office results from Dune: Part One – which cost $165 million to produce and made $402 million at the box office, by all means, a very positive return – and the hype for Part 2, which is partly due to the astounding star-studded cast that has only grown between the two halves, that moviegoers will be flocking to the cinema despite the runtime being on the longer side.
Is Dune: Part Two longer than Part One?
It is indeed, but not an awful lot. Dune: Part One ran for 2 hours and 35 minutes, and Part Two will run for 10 minutes longer than that, for a total of 2 hours and 46 minutes.
If you ask most Frank Herbert book franchise enthusiasts, they’d tell you that it’s better to have the film run for longer and do the incredible sci-fi book justice, than to shorten it to cater to an audience that lacks an attention span and thus risk losing a lot of what made the book brilliant. Granted, it’s not an easy book to adapt, as previous attempts at an adaptation have clearly shown.
And while not all Dune book lovers were pleased, like this Reddit OP:
Some other book readers have pushed back by rebutting the criticism with comments like:
While Villeneuve’s adaptation might not be perfect – a nearly impossible task – it’s still the best Dune adaptation. It’s one of the most challenging sci-fi franchises to adapt, and this rendition has been successful enough to, once again, when Part Two is released, for people from all ages and a variety of cultural backgrounds to run to the cinema to watch how the adaptation of the widely loved, best-selling 1965 novel will conclude.