God Emperor of Dune would make a terrible movie — and we need it

polygon.com:

With the recent release of the trailer for Dune: Part Two, Dune fever has been reignited, and it already seems hotter than it was ahead of the first movie’s premiere. By the time the movie is released in November, Paul Atreides, Lady Jessica, and Chani might even be household names.But even though Frank Herbert wrote six Dune novels, it’s unlikely this film franchise will go on for five more movies. We’ll be lucky if we even get one more.

“I always envisioned three movies,” Denis Villeneuve told EW in a 2021 interview. “That would be the dream. To follow Paul Atreides and his full arc would be nice.” The third movie would be a full adaptation of Dune Messiah, the much-shorter second book in the series that takes readers to the end of Paul’s rule.

It’s a worthy goal for Villeneuve, one that no fan of the books could reasonably complain about: The fact that we got any decent adaptation at all is a miracle. It’s also easy to see why a director would want to bail out of the series after Messiah. While the first two Dune books can be weird and inaccessible at times, they’re nothing compared to the books that come after.

To quickly summarize: Book three in the series, Children of Dune, jumps forward nine years after Paul’s supposed death. His twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, have full access to all the thoughts and feelings their parents ever felt, right up until the moment the twins were conceived. They also have access to their grandparents’ memories, their great-grandparents’ memories, and so on. So even though Paul’s children are only 9 years old, they both talk, think and act with the wisdom of gods. What does Leto II choose to do with this wisdom? The rational thing: He turns himself into a giant indestructible