Sci-Fi Dune

[Weather Witch]

You can easily make some action set pieces bigger and expand on stuff and get it to a fine runtime

Which I suspect they'll do, but alongside some Jihad stuff and tie-ins to Children. People have been speculating that the twins will be born to Chani during the time jump to Messiah as well. That'd certainly shake things up.

 

[Spider-Fan]

Which I suspect they'll do, but alongside some Jihad stuff and tie-ins to Children. People have been speculating that the twins will be born to Chani during the time jump to Messiah as well. That'd certainly shake things up.

I dont think aging them up there would work, though. Not in terms of making a good movie, but you'd essentially just be doing Children of Dune with elements of Dune Messiah sprinkled in.

I go into book spoilers below:

Spoiler

The entire story hinges on Paul seeing Chani die in childbirth and trying to prevent it, but he cannot. You could make it center around a different event, sure. But if you have Leto II and Ghanima already at their ages they were in Children, then how you would frame both it and Children of Dune would be radically different. Too different to be separate stories IMO. So you'd be merging them.

Ghanima's name in Fremen translates to "Spoils of War" and Paul names her as such because he didn't see her in his visions of Chani dying, so she was a gift he didn't see coming. So that's fairly tied to Dune Messiah thematically. Hence why I am saying it isn't so easy as plug them in. It radically changes the story if they're there

In book terms, Dune depending on publisher is like 600-900 pages. Dune Messiah is about 350ish. If we take the average of that page count for Dune, it'd be like 750 pages. So 350 pages is fairly in line with each half of Dune size wise. They have more than enough to do here. I would be surprised if they went this direction. But, we shall see. This is the off-season of the movie after all

 

[Sithborg]

Speculation

Spoiler

I do wonder if what Paul is dealing with, in terms of the twins, is the Golden Path approaching, and him dealing with what that means for him. He took the Water of Life because he didn't think he could win without it, and thus brought the jihad. But, now with it, the Golden Path is revealed to him. I absolutely think that is part of Children that Villenueve would bring into Messiah. Its sort of retconned onto him in Children, so why not add those elements to Messiah. And I almost wonder if Leto and Ghanima are going to be different sides of arguments as to what he should do about the Golden Path.