Denis Villenueve’s Dune has been performing admirably at the international box office, and it’s got a potentially lucrative run in China still to come, but the filmmaker needs domestic audiences to head to their local theater to see his latest sci-fi epic to guarantee that the sequel will be given a green light.
The director compared the idea of watching Dune at home on HBO Max as akin to putting a speedboat in the bathtub, and the overwhelming majority of the massively enthusiastic reviews have urged people to check out the sci-fi epic on the biggest screen possible to do it true justice.
Unfortunately, WorldofReel reports that a high-quality copy of Dune has leaked online ahead of the film’s hybrid release later this week, which was moved forward one day from Friday to Thursday. Warner Bros. will no doubt be mobilizing the troops to try and have it taken down as soon as possible, but it could be a blow for the literary adaptation’s chances of commercial success if people can track it down without even needing an HBO Max subscription.
Dune has been described as one of the year’s best movies, one that fully deserves a second installment to tell the rest of its story, so we’ll be looking on very curiously to see how it performs at the box office this coming weekend now that it’s hit what could turn out to be a fairly sizeable setback.
Published: Oct 18, 2021 04:50 am