"Dune: Part Two" and The Austin Powers Syndrome: First Reactions
What the Austin Powers films can teach us about the long-awaited "Dune" sequel
No, I haven’t flipped my lid. There’s a fascinating lesson we’re about to re-learn, and after having seen Dune: Part Two less than twelve hours ago, I’m more convinced than ever of how it’s going to play out.
Formalities first — as of this moment, Warner Bros. has lifted its embargo on social media but the embargo on “reviews” (an increasingly difficult concept to define) remains in effect. I will therefore state for the record that this is not a review. What I will say is that Denis Villeneuve has more than delivered on the promise of the previous film; Dune: Part Two is spectacular. Fans of the novels and newcomers to the saga will be enthralled. No one, however, will be more enthralled than Christopher Nolan who will end up the greatest beneficiary of the decision by Warner Bros. to move the film from its original November, 2023 release date to March 1, 2024, presumably so as to not have the film’s pre-release publicity hamstrung by the risk of a prolonged actors strike. Had Dune: Part Two found its way into the current Oscar race, it would be a far less certain coronation for Oppenheimer and Christopher Nolan.
To the more salient point at hand — let’s revisit the tumultuous trajectory of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune saga, which keeps colliding with fate and circumstance in the worst possible way.
I should also point out that I have a nagging personal history with this material in that we can’t seen to quit each other. Frank Herbert first published the novel Dune the year I was born. Not quite twenty years later, it was reissued in a new first edition by Putnam, for whom Herbert did quite a bit of publicity, including a signing at the popular 70s/80s era cult sci-fi bookshop “A Change of Hobbit,” which at the time was located in Santa Monica a block from where I’d just graduated high school. Naturally, as a Spielberg/Lucas-generation genre film nerd, I waited in line to get my copy signed by the man himself — and that copy still sits safely in my bookshelf, unopened since that day. That was also the year that David Lynch’s Dune (1984) was released, which I saw opening day at the now-demolished Picwood Theatre in West Los Angeles where they handed us a printed glossary so we could keep track of what was actually going on (not a vote of confidence from the studio). I still have that glossary, too. As luck would have it, my future wife later ended up working for David Lynch for several years, and at one point was also involved in the subsequent three-part television miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune (2000). Incredibly, I have no connection to the remarkable 2014 documentary about the first, ill-fated attempt at filming the novel by the great Chilean experimentalist Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jodorowsky’s Dune, apart from loving it. I do, however, have a connection to the current Dune director, French-Canadian visionary Denis Villeneuve, in that I was one of the very first to sing his praises back in 2002 with a Los Angeles Times piece on the explosion of vibrant, original independent Canadian cinema. His second film, Maelström, had just been released and we spoke at length about all things cinema, but particularly Canadian cinema. Ten years later, he landed an Oscar nomination for his final French-language film, Incendies, which catapulted him into his Hollywood career. And here we are.
When Villeneuve was signed to deliver his take on Dune in 2016, it came at the end of a tumultuous decade of false-starts with a variety of other directors, rights holders and producers. But fans of the material breathed a sigh of relief — here, finally, was a director with a powerful visual sensibility and a mature, grown-up approach to genre material who clearly would do right by Dune.
Then COVID-19 hit.
Bumped a full year from its original late 2020 release date, the film was finally unveiled in October, 2021 in simultaneous release in theaters and on HBO Max. While its $433 million global box office was considered healthy enough to justify a sequel (Villeneuve is also talking about a third film based on Herbert’s own sequel novels), with a half dozen Academy Awards clearly sweetening the pot, the COVID “simultaneous release” strategy momentarily embraced by both Disney and Warner Bros. was deemed a bust. Longtime boosters of streaming genuinely thought the pandemic had delivered them a silver lining to once and finally prove that simultaneous release on streaming and in theaters was the NEXT BIG THING and would be better for both movies and studio profits in the end.
They were wrong.
By all accounts, a tentpole like Dune, in pre-pandemic times, would have easily soared to a global box office of around $1 billion. The roughly half-billion that Warner Bros. left on the table with simultaneous release did not translate into significant new subscribers for HBO Max. It mostly just discouraged a lot of current subscribers from buying a ticket to see it at a theater. Additionally, the decision so infuriated their last remaining in-house auteur, Christopher Nolan, that he took Oppenheimer to Universal — where it has proved to be his most successful film, and an all-but-certain lock to sweep the Oscars.
Flash forward to last year where Dune: Part Two runs into another Act of God with the SAG strike, suffering yet another delay that took it out of the lucrative holiday season and plopped it into the no man’s land of pre-Oscar March, 2024.
Given the prior history of the property — endless false starts, the Jodorowsky fiasco, David Lynch’s unhappy relationship with the De Laurentiis family, who ended up slashing his film’s running time by half — it’s no surprise that whispers of “The Dune Curse” started to become a thing.
Time will obviously tell, but there’s a fascinating historical precedent which may well end up having unexpectedly foreshadowed this moment — and that’s the Mike Myers-created Austin Powers films of the late 90s and early 2000s. If my expectations pan out, we may well end up reflecting on the “simultaneous release” failure as a blessing in disguise which saved us from the prospect of a longer-term, better-funded attempt to replace the theatrical experience with streaming.
The story of the Austin Powers films is, indeed, fascinating. What many now forget is the first film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, was not a box office success. It opened in May of 1997 on little more than 2000 North American screens, and crawled to just under $54 million in North America and a disastrous $14 million overseas. No one would have greenlit a sequel with those kinds of figures. Not then, not now, not ever. But then something really weird happened — the film took on a second, almost cult-like life on home video because it was one of the first films released on the new DVD format. Until that moment, the VHS rental market had been dominated mainly by films whose success in theaters was deemed predictive of their rental and sales figures on VHS. No one imagined that DVD would so substantially reinvent VHS economics until Austin Powers. Its popularity was such that a sequel was greenlit with a budget double that of the original film ($33 million) and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me was released in June of 1999 in over 3000 screens. The box office results spoke for themselves: a domestic gross in excess of $200 million, nearly quadrupling the previous film’s earnings, and an overseas gross of over $100 million, multiplying the previous film’s gross by a factor of nearly eight. Proving these numbers were no fluke, the third entry — Austin Powers in Goldmember — was released in 2002 to similar box office, slightly outperforming the previous film in North America and slightly underperforming it overseas.
The film industry learned a valuable lesson between the first two Austin Powers films — which is that theatrical is king and money left on the table because you didn’t maximize the potential of the theatrical release cannot be and will never be recaptured in ancillary markets. What Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery made on DVD in no way compensated for New Line Cinema’s failure to see and capitalize on its theatrical potential. Instead, it sent them a message — it told them they had missed something in the zeitgeist, and that the zeitgeist ended up discovering it anyway when it was too late. To their credit, New Line remedied their mistake with the next two films, reaffirming that theatrical is where the value of a film is indexed for exploitation in ancillaries like DVD. Summarized more succinctly — if you strike gold in theatrical release, your ancillaries will also be gold. If you strike gold in ancillary release after failing to strike gold in theatrical — it’s a sign you missed the boat.
Dune’s 2021 release barely crested $100 million in North America while still going on to earn a very respectable (all things considered) $325 million overseas. Compare that to star Timothée Chalamet’s other current Warner Bros. smash hit, Wonka, which has made over $200 million in North America and which will blow past $400 million internationally this next weekend and it’s very clear where the potential for Dune: Part Two lies. With audiences starved for spectacle, if Dune: Part Two smashes the box office performance of its predecessor the same way Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me did to its predecessor, Hollywood could very easily get a sobering case of déja vu. The Austin Powers films snapped Hollywood out of a trance and taught it that DVD was a powerful new revenue source… but it was still gravy. It was complimentary to theatrical, it benefitted from theatrical, it could help grow the revenue pot beyond theatrical — but it could not replace theatrical.
For far too many years, the Wall Street-driven narrative that streaming would either replace or substantially diminish the theatrical experience has been accepted at face value without any serious challenge to the underlying assumptions or any honest interrogation of the data. The result has been a Netflix hangover which is now resulting in a horrifying volume of layoffs across the industry, all because the decision makers in the suites bought into an impossible fantasy. Dune: Part Two can help put an end to all of that and send streaming back to its proper place alongside DVD — a valued but still complimentary part of what has always been, remains and will always be a theatrical business.
