Earlier this year things were looking quite good for the remake of Dune. Though Peter Berg had dropped out of the project, they had found a suitable new director in Taken's Pierre Morel. Then the production brought in Chase Palmer to beef up the script. Things, by all accounts, were looking good. Then came nine months of silence, the only mention of the film coming when Morel's name was mentioned in regard to the Ouija movie. Now the project may be in serious peril.
Deadline reports that time is now running out for Paramount to make a movie based on Frank Herbert novel as the rights are soon going to expire. The article states that there was a rumor that the project was headed toward turnaround, however those rumors were false; instead, if the studio doesn't have a production scheduling set up by next spring, their ownership will end and will revert back to the original owners. Whats more, the article says that Morel is no longer attached as a director, meaning that the movie has even more ground to cover than originally thought.
This story is a bit hard to spin as good news for Dune fans as this can really only work out one of two ways: either Paramount tries to get everything together incredibly quickly and makes a hash job of it or they move slowly and risk the movie never even getting made. It's not easy to make a film that has a budget over $100 million, which the project will most certainly have, and anybody putting up money is going to be at least somewhat hesitant. Not helping things is the looming presence of David Lynch's film from 1984 which, by many accounts, was a disaster. Dune fans, keep your fingers crossed that this works out for the best.
