We finally have a number we can trust.
The Irish Film Classification Office has logged Denis Villeneuve's “Dune: Part Three” at 151 minutes. That's 2 hours and 31 minutes, and it comes from a ratings body that actually saw a final cut, not from a theater chain's presale placeholder.
This settles months of back-and-forth. When IMAX tickets went on sale over the summer, the listed runtime was 140 minutes. In October, AMC quietly bumped it to 151. There was also a three-hour rough cut that screened internally for Warner Bros. brass.
At 150 minutes, ‘Part Three’ is still the shortest film in the trilogy. It runs four minutes shorter than “Dune” (155) and 15 minutes shorter than ‘Part Two’ (166). That said, “Dune Messiah” is the leanest book in Herbert's original trilogy, and it's a far more intimate story than what came before.
Still, 151 minutes is a lot of movie for a novel that's barely 250 pages. This tells me Villeneuve must have taken some liberties with the source material to stretch it to this epic length. Javier Bardem has already hinted that ‘Part Three’ goes well beyond “Dune Messiah.” The recently released final trailer hinted as much.
More than an hour of the film was shot for IMAX, so plan your tickets accordingly. Not that audiences seem worried about the length. Ticket sales have been staggering. London's BFI IMAX sold 33,000 advance tickets in 24 hours, a first-day record. In the U.S., reports put advance sales at around $10M already, putting ‘Part Three’ on pace to be the first film in the trilogy to open above $100M domestically.
“Dune: Part Three” opens December 18, the same day as “Avengers: Doomsday.”
Alright, let’s settle this once and for all. What’s the best Bond movie? While we wait for the next actor to be cast, let’s do what Bond fans have been doing for six decades: argue about which one is actually the best.