Dune: Part Twois proving to bethe first big cinema release of 2024, but those hoping to see a bit more of the movie when it arrives on home media will be left disappointed. DirectorDenis Villeneuvehas all but guaranteed that the hours of the deleted scenes he shot for the sequel to his 2021 hit will never be seen by the public in any form.
Dune: Part Two
The physical release ofDunebucks the usual trend of having a selection of deleted scenes among its extra features. Although some fans hoped that this was something that may be rectified in a boxed set of the film and its sequel, Villeneuve closed this avenue in an interview withCollider’s Steve WeintraubbeforeDune: Part Twoarrived in cinemas. Sharing his candid view on what a movie’s deleted scenes really mean to him, he said:
“Sometimes I remove shots and I say, ‘I cannot believe I’m cutting this out.’ I feel like a samurai opening my gut. It’s painful, so I cannot go back after that and create a Frankenstein and try to reanimate things that I killed. It’s too painful. When it’s dead, it’s dead, and it’s dead for a reason. But yes, it is a painful project, but it is my job. The movie prevails. I’m very, I think, severe in the editing room. I’m not thinking about my ego, I’m thinking about the movie.”
Dune 2 is a Longer Movie Than Its Predecessor
One thing for certain is thatDune: Part Twois not a blink-and-you-miss-it movie.The film clocks in at two hours, 47 minutes, which is around 10 minutes longer thanDune. Villeneuve said during the press tour that Warner Bros. did not ask him to make any cuts in the movie, and in fact wanted him to make it longer.
How Dune 2 Completely Subverts the Chosen One Storyline
The chosen one is one of the most widely recognizable staples of genre fiction. Dune: Part Two takes an axe to the very concept of it.
However, Villeneuve is a director who allows the movie to dictate how long it should be, and for him, telling a story is much more important than worrying about how long the final movie will be. He added:
“The runtime of a movie, for me, the length of the movie is based on what the story needs. Sometimes I’ve made movies in my life that were 75 minutes, and this one is two hours, 45 [minutes], I think, something like that. It’s not, for me, the runtime, it’s about the storytelling, and I felt that I wanted to create a momentum . I wanted an energy in the movie that I was looking for that excited me, and I thought that was the perfect runtime… For me, no matter what is the physical length of the running time, it’s always the experience as you’re watching the movie and how you feel . You can be bored by a five-minute movie, and there are some movies, we know some of them, that are three or four hours that you could live there forever. So, you just have to find the perfect running time, and that’s what I tried to do.”
Dune: Part Twois in cinemas now. 2021’sDunecan be streamed on Max.
