‘Dune’ And The Art of Big Screen Beauty

A funny thing happened on the way to the cineplex’s demise.

For months, already declining theater revenues were struck a near-fatal blow by the Delta variant resurgence. As studios and theaters wrestled over what movie-viewing would look like in a post-pandemic world, it seemed inevitable that streamers would triumph. To the degree that films would still have theatrical runs, it would be largely out of a sense of obligatory nostalgia — bonus bucks on top of the real money, which is using premium content to draw audiences to platforms where the piece of entertainment they’re watching is never just about itself, but also about its interconnectedness to a cornucopia of cinematic worlds.

This Easter egg ties into that bit of dialogue from an earlier movie that references a cameo in a prequel which leads to an after-credits scene that sparks more excitement in viewers than the thing they actually plunked down money to watch. You can click the stop button any time you like, but you can never leave.

Then came “Dune.” Suddenly, even though the film was immediately available to stream at home on HBO Max, the most niche and impractical big screen experience, Imax, experienced a resurgence. According to a quarterly earnings report, “Dune” scored Imax’s biggest October opening weekend ever, bringing in $17.8 million, or 20% of the film’s total weekend haul. Based on the movie’s success, the company had the best October in it’s history. “Dune” was no slouch in standard theaters either.

What that tells us is that people didn’t just want to see “Dune”; they understood they should watch it in as immersive an environment as possible. To further bolster this point, unlike the recent big Marvel releases — which cratered in their second and third weekends in theaters — and despite facing stiff competition in the midst of pandemic fear, “Dune” had moderate legs.

Given how few audience members are familiar with the 1965 novel and how meditative director Denis Villeneuve’s work is known to be, what “Dune” offered was the opposite of Marvel’s wink-wink-nod-nod fan service. Ticket buyers understood they were going to see something intellectually demanding, yes, but also beautiful.

As Hannah Long writes in conservative journal The Dispatch, “Audiences will put up with a lot of weirdness for a friendly, earnest epic that doesn’t equate art with ugliness. ‘Dune’ is strange but beautiful (i.e. not ugly), and it’s spectacular…It’s a film designed for a big, big screen

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