A remake of the 1984 David Lynch film Dune has been on the way for a while now. The movie was beginning to take some steps when The Rundown and Hancock director Peter Berg was hired to helm the remake. These steps ended when Berg stepped away after he was offered the opportunity to direct a movie based on the popular Hasbro game, Battleship, which he felt that he simply couldn’t turn down. Now comes word via Entertainment Weekly that Paramount Pictures has found and hired Berg’s replacement for Dune, and his name is Pierre Morel.
Morel is fairly new to the directing game, but he has showed promise so far. He directed the popular Liam Neeson angry father film Taken, and the upcoming John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers action flick, From Paris With Love. Before starting his career as a director, he also worked as a cinematographer on movies like Jason Statham’s The Transporter and War.
Paramount will now be seeking someone to work on a rewrite of the script by Josh Zetumer (Quantum of Solace). This next step doesn’t appear to be due to a disliking of Zetumer’s script, but more to fine tune everything and calibrate it to Morel’s vision of the film. It sounds like Morel is planning on being very faithful to the 1965 Frank Herbert novel of the same name, which is always a better strategy than basing your remake on an previously existing film adaptation.
Wasn’t there already a Dune remake a few years ago? I remember seeing it as a mini-series on Sci-Fi Channel or something…
Comment by Paul — January 5, 2010 @ 10:42 am
Hopefully it’ll be nothing like the David Lynch pile-of-crap that was his Dune adaptation.
Comment by s3ntient — January 6, 2010 @ 5:58 am
yeah Sci-fi did a miniseries on both Dune and Children of Dune (which I think technically covers the first three books). Some of the lines among the characters were switch around from the book to help the movie flow better. Personally, instead of another remake I would like to see them just continue the series and get to the other books instead of rehashing the first 2 over and over again.
Comment by Dr.Necropolis — January 7, 2010 @ 4:11 pm
I guess the first one or two Dune novels keeping getting rehashed as various parties try to get it right. Dune seems like it should make a great movie, but its political and religious complexities often get in the way. Still, it has a young and powerful hero and awesome as in really loathsome bad guys.
Comment by Tracy Falbe — January 8, 2010 @ 10:22 am
So he worked on ‘The Transporter’ and directed ‘From Paris with Love’ which looks GOD-AWFUL. (Bald John Travolta as an action hero? Really?)
Maybe good casting can save this, but it is not showing promise so far. I want to see Dune as a LotR style epic that showcases the intricacies of the novel’s universe, not a 90-minute action romp through Arrakis.
Comment by C lab Cpn — January 15, 2010 @ 10:31 am