Dune: Part Two is coming sooner than expected

If it’s starting to feel a little sandier than usual in here, there’s a reason: Dune 2 is coming, baby, and it’s sooner than you think.

This is per Deadline, which reports that Timothée Chalamet and Denis Villeneuve’s second Dune movie has just been bumped up on the 2024 release schedule by two whole weeks, moving from March 15 to March 1, and ensuring that will get back to Arrakis just a little bit faster than we were previously expecting. We can only assume this was some kind of desperate ploy to avoid a terrible future in which brutal war sweeps across the galaxy in the name of Imperial rule, and people are turning into sandworms, and there’s some stuff with dead people coming back to life, and people getting possessed by ghosts… (Sorry, it’s been a minute since we’ve actually read the Dune books.) Beyond that, we can’t actually come up with a good reason the movie has been moved—nothing big is opening on either weekend in competition with it—although it’s possible, as Warner Bros.’ first big release of the year, they’re just hoping to kick off their film schedule with a little extra oomph (and maybe an extra boost to earnings before Q1 ends on March 31).

Whatever the reason, we’ll take it: 2021's Dune wasn’t perfect, but it was gorgeous, ambitious, and huge, and seeing Villeneuve cruise into the back half of Herbert’s novel—i.e., the bits with the sandworms, the psychedelic time-bending drug use, and the murder duels—should be a hell of a lot of fun. Will someone’s name be a killing word, as they employ the weirding way? Will we finally get to see Zendaya do more than just narrate? Will Villeneuve be ambitious enough to seed in a genuine tease for an adaptation of sequel novel Dune: Messiah? We’ll know come early March.