Jason Momoa is no stranger to boarding big budget Warner Bros. blockbusters that come burdened with the hopes of launching a multi-film series, even if he fared much better with Aquaman than Justice League. He also knows a thing or two about seeing those films re-edited into substantially longer form, having been a vocal proponent of the Snyder Cut from the very beginning.
Denis Villenueve’s Dune isn’t coming to theaters until October after facing a hefty delay, and the filmmaker has already blasted Warner Bros. for sending the sci-fi epic to HBO Max from day one, claiming it could kill the franchise before it’s even started after his 155-minute adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel only covered half of the book in order to save the rest for a sequel.
Dune has been labeled as having the potential to be this generation’s The Lord of the Rings, and the footage from the trailers paints a visually dazzling and jaw-dropping slice of cinema. In a new interview, Momoa admitted that he didn’t want to see the movie cut down at all in the editing suite, revealing he’d much rather binge four, five or even six hours of what Villenueve has cooked up.
“It was a cool movie. You know what they need to do? They need to make the four-to-six hour version of the first half. It’s like, ‘Let’s watch the four-to-five-hour movie like a TV show; I can choose when I want to watch the whole thing’. I want to see Denis’s whole vision. I don’t want it to be trimmed.”
Fingers crossed that Dune performs well enough at the box office to merit a second installment, something that can’t be guaranteed by any stretch, especially as business continues to struggle and rumors of even more release date shuffles continue to make the rounds. A spinoff series is in the works for HBO Max already, and in the event Dune does bomb, then maybe Momoa can spearhead another campaign to see a six-hour miniseries rise from the ashes.
