Dune: Part Three opens with no shortage of firepower, as the CinemaCon crowd learned Tuesday.
Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Jason Momoa and director Denis Villeneuve took the stage at the Las Vegas event to discuss the sequel. They then unveiled the first seven minutes from the highly anticipated film during Warner Bros.‘ presentation.
The footage featured Javier Bardem as Stilgar as he led his troops against a seemingly insurmountable enemy. The intense battle scenes featured an endless array of shots fired and plenty of actual fire.
After those seven minutes, additional footage included Chalamet’s Paul Atreides confronting Zendaya’s Chani in a tense moment.
“You’ve conquered the galaxy,” Momoa tells Chalamet in the new footage. “You’ve destroyed thousands of worlds.” This leads Chalamet to ask, “What are your thoughts on that?” to which Momoa replies, “I think you’re way beyond redemption.”
Later, Zendaya asks Chalamet, “How does it feel to be human like everyone else, Paul Atreides?”
In introducing the scenes, Villeneuve called the film a thriller and teased, “It’s more intense and definitely more emotional.”
Chalamet said of Paul, “He’s become his worst vision,” and the star teased his character “becoming an all-powerful emperor of the dark universe.”
Zendaya explained, “The years don’t seem to have been kind to anyone on Dune. It’s been an ungentle and unkind few years. There’s so much left to fight for.” She continued about Chani, “That youthful outlook is completely gone.”
Momoa acknowledged that his role in the film is much different from the last time viewers saw him, given that Duncan Idaho died in the first one, and Momoa is back as a clone: “I’m sent as a gift to Paul to see how he handles someone that he hasn’t seen and see how he takes that.”
Chalamet added, “It was deeply moving to be on a sci-fi trilogy on the scale of Lord of the Rings.”
For Zendaya, the footage represents the actress appearing in two days in a row of major releases teased at CinemaCon, with the Euphoria star also having shown up in Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day footage.
The news comes a month after the first trailer dropped for the film, and limited seats for Imax 70mm screenings for the film quickly sold out.
Dune: Part Three stars Chalamet, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Javier Bardem, Florence Pugh, Taylor-Joy, Rebecca Ferguson and Momoa. The film takes place 17 years after Part Two and follows Emperor Paul Atreides as he struggles with the consequences of his holy war, trapped in a cycle of violence while facing conspiracies from the Bene Gesserit, Tleilaxu, and his wife, Irulan.
Warner Bros. and Legendary release Dune: Part Three on Dec. 18, which has been the source of plenty of eyebrow raising as Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday is coming on the same date (an event that’s been dubbed “Dunesday”). Exhibitors are hoping to get an exclusive look at Dune‘s box office rival when Disney has its presentation on Thursday.
