Traditionally, there are three ways to translate a book series to the big screen. You can make one movie per book (Harry Potter), you can cram a bunch of books into one movie (The Dark Tower), or you can squeeze multiple movies out of one book (The Hobbit). The Harry Potter method is usually the most popular, but according to Dune author Frank Herber’s son Brian Herbert (via io9), Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation is actually going to attempt to pull off the Hobbit-style squeeze. On Twitter, Brian Herbert noted that the first of Villeneuve’s two movies will only cover “approximately half” of Frank Herbert’s Dune:
Villeneuve said in March that he was planning to make two Dune movies, a plan that will presumably depend on the success of this first movie, but it’s nice to get a semi-official confirmation of what he’s doing. Other than that, we also know that this Dune movie will be “Star Wars for adults,” that it won’t be anything like David Lynch’s Dune, and that it will most likely star Timothée Chalamet.