Denis Villeneuve wants Dune on the big screen instead of streaming, although the movie's best chance for success (and odds of justifying a sequel) is a streaming release. While the prestige of theatrical releases, especially for big movies like Dune, is an understandable desire for a filmmaker of Villeneuve's caliber, Dune already faced an uphill battle before the pandemic, and a simultaneous release should have always been seen as the film's best chance at gaining an audience.
Villeneuve makes great movies worthy of the theatrical experience, from intimate thrillers like Prisoners to psychological slow burns like Arrival or ambitious sci-fi like Blade Runner 2049, but he has yet to establish himself as a box office draw. To be fair, most of his movies with sub-$50 million budgets have made fair profits, but his highest-grossing film, Blade Runner 2049, topped out under $260 million with a $150 million production budget. After marketing and revenue sharing with exhibitors is factored in, the movie was estimated to have lost around $80 million.
Now, Villeneuve has an even bigger budget with Dune, and the movie is set to hit in a subdued post-pandemic box office (concerns over the COVID-19 delta variant notwithstanding), and the situation doesn't look promising. Blade Runner is arguably a more well-known property, but even the original floundered in the box office, but Dune's 1984 adaptation by David Lynch fared even worse, making only $30 million on a reported $40 million budget. Granted, Dune 1984 was also greeted by abysmal reviews, and hopes are high for Villeneuve's rendition, but even the most positive of reviews isn't enough to make the kind of money Dune's budget would demand, as evidenced by The Suicide Squad, which is one of the year's best-reviewed movies and based on more recognizable IP, yet opened below expectations and dropped like a rock after that.
Dune might be best experienced on the big screen, but that doesn't mean that's where people are more likely to check it out. In fact, Dune has the makings of a huge hit on streaming and could be a huge draw for HBO Max if it were to see the same day-and-date streaming release as other Warner Bros. 2021 movies. It's all but guaranteed to fail at the box office, but could actually demand a big streaming audience, where immediate profits are far less of a concern as HBO Max seeks to grow its subscriber base. A streaming release would provide the kind of value Warner Bros. needs to dismiss the likely low numbers of a post-pandemic theatrical release without denying the availability of a prestige experience for those who place as high a value on the big screen as Denis Villeneuve. It's a mistake to take that away in favor of a box office that almost certainly won't be there, especially when a sequel hangs in the balance. Granted, it's possible profit was never the primary concern, and Warner Bros. may have been more interested in the potential prestige of the project, having at least loosely committed to a two-part adaptation from Villeneuve on the heels of Blade Runner 2049's abysmal box office performance.
Dune also already has some synergy with HBO Max due to the development of Dune: The Sisterhood, so a streaming release would also bolster interest for the upcoming spin-off series on the same platform and provide the best odds of giving Villeneuve's Dune franchise the kind of visibility needed to justify Dune: Part 2. Unfortunately, Villeneuve is too caught up in the temporary prestige of a theatrical release to see this. It's undeniable big movies of the kind Denis Villeneuve values look and sound better on a big screen, but if a tree falls in a 70mm laser IMAX theater with booming 12 channel sound and nobody is around to see it, does it actually make a sound?
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