Enlarge / Legendary Pictures has confirmed that it plans to make Dune: Part Three with director Denis Villeneuve. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Dune: Part Two is still raking in the moolah at the box office, and deservedly so. But judging by my various feeds, fans are already swooning over the prospect of director Denis Villeneuve extending his vision into a trilogy by adapting Frank Herbert's 1969 sequel, Dune Messiah, for the next installment. Will there be a Dune: Part Three? Most signs currently point to yes, with a couple of caveats. Exactly how soon we'll be seeing a return to Arrakis depends a lot on Villeneuve.

Variety confirmed that Legendary Pictures is working with the director on developing Dune: Part Three, although it remains unclear from the wording of the plethora of news items whether the project has officially been greenlit. ("Development" can mean a lot of things.) Naturally, the studio is eager, as are we: the film is the biggest hit of 2024 thus far, with global earnings of $630 million (although the hotly anticipated Deadpool and Wolverine this summer might give it a run for its money).

That confirmation sent fresh frissons of excitement across the Internet, although Villeneuve had been talking about the prospect as far back as September 2021. Those plans always depended on the success of Part Two, and that hurdle has obviously been cleared. By August 2023, the director was on record saying there were "words on paper" for a third film. And we learned just last month that composer Hans Zimmer was already working on the score for Dune: Part Three.

Enlarge / Kyle MacLachlan in Dune, 1984. (credit: Everett)

David Lynch’s 1984 sci-fi epic Dune is—in many ways—a misbegotten botch job. Still, as with more than a few ineffectively ambitious films before it, the artistic flourishes Lynch grafted onto Frank Herbert’s sprawling Machiavellian narrative of warring space dynasties have earned it true cult classic status. Today, fans of the film, which earned a paltry $30 million at the box office and truly bruising reviews upon its release, still wonder what Lynch would have done if given the opportunity to adapt the next two novels in Herbert’s cycle: Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

Franchising was the plan before the first film crashed and burned, with Lynch and star Kyle MacLachlan (playing Paul Atreides) set to shoot both Dune sequels back-to-back in 1986. Miniature spaceship models, costumes, and props from the first film were placed in storage by producer Dino De Laurentiis for use on these follow-ups, while the director hammered away on a Dune II script. “I wrote half a script for the second Dune. I really got into it because it wasn’t a big story,” he says in Lynch on Lynch, “more like a neighborhood story. It had some really cool things in it.”

During the two years I spent putting together my book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History, I had no luck uncovering Lynch's script for Dune II, despite Frank Herbert telling Prevue magazine in December 1984 that he possessed a copy and was advising Lynch on it. “Now that we speak the same ‘language,’ it’s much easier for both of us to make progress, especially with the screenplays,” Herbert told the publication. Then, in July 2023, within the Frank Herbert archives at California State University, Fullerton, I came across a slim folder with a sticky note declaring “Dune Messiah script revisions,” addressed to the second floor of VFX man Barry Nolan’s office in Burbank where Lynch supervised the final effects shoots and editing on Dune.

We didn't get to see Dune: Part Two—the second film in director Denis Villeneuve's stunning adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic—last month as originally planned since the film's November release was delayed until next March due to the Hollywood strikes. But Warner Bros. doesn't want us to completely forget about Dune in the meantime, so it dropped another trailer for the holiday season.

(Spoilers for Dune: Part One below.)

As reported previously (also here and here), Herbert's novel Dune is set in the distant future and follows the fortunes of various noble houses in what amounts to a feudal interstellar society. Much of the action takes place on the planet Arrakis, where the economy is driven largely by a rare, life-extending drug called melange ("the spice"). Melange also conveys a kind of prescience and makes faster-than-light travel practical. There's betrayal, a prophecy concerning a messianic figure, giant sandworms, and battle upon battle as protagonist Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) contends with rival House Harkonnen and strives to defeat the forces of Shaddam IV, Emperor of the Known Universe.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders wave to onlookers aboard the USS Yorktown after splashdown to end the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. (credit: NASA/AFP via Getty Images)

Frank Borman, an Air Force test pilot, astronaut, and accomplished businessman who led the first crew to fly to the Moon in 1968, died Tuesday in Montana, NASA said Thursday. He was 95 years old.

“Today we remember one of NASA’s best," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. "Astronaut Frank Borman was a true American hero. Among his many accomplishments, he served as the commander of the Apollo 8 mission, humanity’s first mission around the Moon in 1968."

Borman, joined by crewmates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, orbited the Moon 10 times over the course of about 20 hours. They were the first people to see the Earth from another world, a memory of "wonderment" Borman recalled decades later. Apollo 8 produced one of the most famous photos ever taken, the iconic "Earthrise" showing a blue orb—the setting for all of human history until then—suspended in the blackness of space over the charcoal gray of the Moon's cratered surface.

Enlarge (credit: BMW)

LISBON, Portugal—Last week we wrote about driving a pair of new M-badged electric BMWs. With the arrival of the i5 M60 and the iX M70, there are now go-fast variants of all four of BMW's battery-electric vehicles. But as BMW will openly admit, those aren't true M cars. That's not to say that BMW's M Division is afraid of electrification—last year it debuted the XM, a performance plug-in hybrid SUV. And next year, the XM's powertrain will reappear in a plug-in hybrid M5. But when might we see a purely electric M car?

Conveniently for us, Frank van Meel, CEO of BMW M, was on hand in Portugal to sit down and talk about the future of M performance and electrification. And, as it turns out, we might see a fully electric BMW M car in plenty of time before the end of this decade.

"Well, if you look on social media, you can already see our mule test car with quad motors, because for us, that is a very promising concept for high performance," van Meel said, referring to recently released photos of a BMW i4 EV with the license plate M HP 4 E.