For all that they still aren't making Ringworld or Stranger in a Strange Land movies. It's no fair! Those great stories deserve to be wrecked, torn, spindled, mutilated and spat onto a big screen too!

Imagine the LOLPierson's Puppeteers!

Well, the other possibility is that no matter how much the new adaptation is butchered (I'm imagining Matrixesque slo-mo scenes of Paul doing kung-fu twists on top of sandworms....) it will expose many more people to the book, and the net result will be more people actually reading and understanding the complexities of it.

(Yeah... and monkeys might fly out of my butt.)

The only reasonable way for Dune to be made into a movie would be for it to be done in another country with absolutely no connection to Hollywood.  Any action in any of the Dune books is completely secondary to the real movement, which happens entirely in the brains of the characters.  Hollywood is incapable of producing a movie subtle enough to make that compelling.

The one good thing that is sure to come out of this is that I'm guaranteed to read all six books again to purge the new movie from my consciousness.  I never get tired of reading them.

Damn Dirty Ape, do you think Olivia Newton John would be available to play one of the Reverend Mothers?

He's an adequate actor, and a decent director, but definitely not someone like Ridley Scott who could do this project justice. Children of Dune on Scifi blew, but they made an okay attempt at telling the whole story in Scifi's Dune, except for for the low budget and stoic acting. Besides, who are you kidding Damndirtyape? You know practically everyone who responds to this thread is gonna watch it because I would say most are fans of Dune. While it is true that eternally fiddling with a good story may be not according the proper respect to its source, sometimes you have to go through some really crappy adaptations until you get something good. Example...Hamlet ala Kenneth Branagh. Peter Berg may not do this incarnation justice, but the source material is so good that I think someone eventually will give it its proper respect.

Sidenote: If we are discussing Scifi epics that need to be translated to the big screen, Dan Simmons' Hyperion series is most deserving.

Not saying I wouldn't see it.  Just that it's embarrassing to see this get a third try not a decade removed from the second try.  In the hands of an inexperienced director, there's a serious risk of the integrity of the book being undermined and I'd hate to see that happen

And I can't totally agree with you on Brannagh's Hamlet--it's not bad, but the half Hollywood/half RSC casting didn't serve it well--anyway, I think he peaked as a director with Henry V.

As for Olivia Newton John, all of the big epic trilogies of the past few years (the Star Wars prequels, the Tolkien movies, The Matrix movies) were shot in Australia or New Zealand, so they'd probably be legally required to use Olivia Newton John.  Kinda like how Canadian radio stations have to play 30% Canadian artists.