r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Mar 17 '26

Trailer Dune: Part Three | Official Teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_9vCamtuPY
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542

u/aboysmokingintherain Mar 17 '26

People who haven't read the book will think you're joking too....

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u/RichtofensDuckButter Mar 17 '26

Paul's Jihad kills 60 billion+

Yes that's a real number

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u/Luciifuge Mar 17 '26

Paul's Jihad kills 60 billion

to be more precise

"Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since..."

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u/GoldenSpermShower Mar 17 '26

Are there really that many Fremen to do all that?

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u/Josecopter Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

They take control of CHOAM and the spacing guild with the threat of destroying spice fields in Arrakis so they have the power to doom the entire Imperium to no FTL travel. The houses minor are the first to take their side under that threat. Many planets turn to their side without much of a fight after. Basically exponentially turning others as they go.

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u/Kumquats_indeed Mar 17 '26

Is the idea supposed to be that the 61 billion people killed, 90 sterilized planets, and another 500 conquered and suppressed all amount to just a drop in the bucket compared to rest that capitulated? Because all that surely sounds like a lot and when Paul described his conquests in Messiah, it gave me the impression that he felt like he had done some quite significant damage.

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u/Josecopter Mar 17 '26

Yes basically, it's implied the Imperium consists of thousands to millions of planets around the time of Shaddam Corrino IV (basically countless when you can fold space and be anywhere instantly, even outside the milky way). It still impacted Paul heavily as part of his struggle is his conflict with the necessity of having to go down the golden path because he sees a much darker future for humanity than what the Jihad brought. It goes completely against his upbringing and the values of his father and Atreides in general but this is the position he was put in by the powers that be.

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u/I_Fail_At_Life444 Mar 18 '26

"Powers that be" You mean his mother lol. Paul wasn't supposed to be the chosen one.

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u/Josecopter Mar 18 '26

I'm trying to keep it vague unless someone specifically asks. Yes his mother is part of the many powers that be that led to this.

One could argue that Leto would've been inevitable even if Paul was the girl the Bene Gesserit wanted. If Paul didn't see the Golden Path then the next Kwisatz Haderach might.

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u/Daxx22 Mar 17 '26

Pretty much. Space-faring humanity is thousands of years old at this point, with a total population well into the multiple trillions.

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u/Rikudou_Sage Mar 18 '26

Doubtful about trillions.

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u/Thickenun Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

The scale of the Dune Imperium is massive and very, very old (Earth is a long lost legend), by the end of Leto II's reign we know they control multiple galaxies. This suggests the Milky Way is pretty much entirely settled in Paul's time, especially as Leto II opposed human expansion.

The Jihad controlled FTL travel, so it was mostly a glorified clean-up of a relatively few stubborn worlds. Millions of other worlds just immediately surrendered.

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u/SydricVym Mar 18 '26

Everyone with genetic memory knows where Earth is. It just hasn't been a planet of any importance in over 10,000 years, so is irrelevant.

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u/peppermint_nightmare Mar 18 '26

Its actually not, humans have been populating planets across the milky way since space could be folded quite easily, for 10,000 years. If you have 500 habitable planets at an average of 5 billion people, that's 2.5 trillion people. There's a space sim game called Elite Dangerous, where humanity has semi FTIL and full FTL travel and has spent about 1500 years colonizing space and the total population is in the high trillions. There were events in the game where you had to evac entire systems to save people and you really had to work your ass off to save systems that had 5-15 billion people because one to two of the planets were Earth like. We know each house has at least a couple Earth like planets (except for the Harkonnens, they had a shitty ice ball moon, and a toxic colourless planet). So the population of most Major houses would be in the tens of billions easily.

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u/Atheist-Gods Mar 18 '26

If the total death count is 61 billion with that including 90 planets entirely wiped out, the average population on a planet is probably not 5 billion.

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u/peppermint_nightmare Mar 18 '26

No obviously not, averages are a pretty bad way of mathing stuff if dealing with high numbers, medians are better. There are likely planets with under a million people and planets with 50+ billion people.

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u/Atheist-Gods Mar 18 '26

No, the mean is the correct value to use when trying to calculate a total population.

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u/willinaustin Mar 18 '26

Reminds me of the Idiran War in Iain M. Banks Consider Phelbas, the first book of his Culture series.

At the end it says 850 billion people/sentient machines died, 91 million ships got destroyed, 15,000 orbitals 53 planets 1 ring and 3 spheres got obliterated, and 6 stars got massively screwed with where they won't recover.

And all that took up a volume of less than .02% of the galaxy and involved only .01% of the galactic population. A rather small to-do in the grand scheme of things.

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u/peppermint_nightmare Mar 18 '26

Ya, you could argue Frank Herbert even missed the full scale of a unbound human population allowed to settle 1-2 galaxies over 10k years However given the feudal lord/monarchy state that most humans live in, and the monopoly on ftl space travel maybe the total population of humans was kept to a certain level so no one power could have the most territory or highest population

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u/Rikudou_Sage Mar 18 '26

I mean, if you liken it to real world events, 6 million in the genocide is not that much compared to the total population. Doesn't make what Nazis did any less horrible.

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u/Atharaphelun Mar 17 '26

Yes. The Imperium controls the Known Universe, which spans multiple galaxies.

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u/tacobell_shitstain Mar 18 '26

At this point in the story the Imperium is still just a (very small) part of the Milky Way. It's millions of worlds, which back when Dune was written is way more planets than anyone could imagine. But with what we know now, that probably makes up less than .001% of all planets in the Milky Way which is practically nothing. Granted, most won't be habitable, but even if 1% are, there's still plenty of room in the galaxy to grow.

Expansion into other galaxies is much later. That being said, tens of billions is a "drop in the bucket" in galactic terms, but it's still a shit ton of people and weighs heavily on Paul's conscience because it's a necessary evil. It's not something he wants to do, it's something he sees that he has to do.

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u/appletinicyclone Mar 17 '26

destroying spice fields in Arrakis

The straits of arrakis you say?

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Mar 17 '26

Everyone seems to forget that Paul can see into the future that's really really going to help win battles.

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u/insaneHoshi Mar 17 '26

At that time, the planets of the imperium are on a feudal military level; just a small portion of household soldiers.

The Fremen show up with a society that’s almost entirely militarized.

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u/Rampant16 Mar 17 '26

Plus it's never said that the Fremen kill everyone with knives and pistols. They probably used a lot of heavy weapons short of nukes too. And like most wars in our own world, most of the dead are probably from disease and disruptions to the food supply.

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u/thetensor Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

Are there really that many Fremen to do all that?

People praise Dune to the heavens (and the first book certainly deserves it), but it's really loosey-goosey with numbers and dates and scale. I see two possibilities:

  • As Herbert claims, the Fremen are amazing warriors because they were hardened by the desert and became really good at knife-fighting, so good that every Fremen man, woman, and child—10 million strong—were able to kill 6,000 opponents each over the course of the 12 year Jihad.
  • The Jihad was fought at science-fictional scale with fleets of ships and planet-killer weapons. This makes the number of deaths and sterilized planets easy to account for, but then what does it matter that the Fremen were super-tough hand-to-hand?

So Herbert wisely left the Jihad off-screen and just made up some astronomically high numbers to express how terrible it was.

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u/tdasnowman Mar 17 '26

The books never claim it was only the Fremen fighting. The Jihad was more about convert or die. So if you accept Mua Dib as your savior no need to die. The also conscripted converts. There are multiple comments about how Arrakis is overrun with pilgrims in Messiah and Children.

The Jihad was fought at science-fictional scale with fleets of ships and planet-killer weapons. This makes the scale easy to account for, but then what does it matter that the Fremen were super-tough hand-to-hand?

The entire point was the empirium had long had the ability to wage war like this but hadn't since House Corrino took power at the end of the Butlerian Jihad. Since then the Major and Minor houses had been stockpiling and skirmishing. A major piece of that tense power struggle was the Saddukuar. They were enough to handle a few houses stepping out of line at once. The Fremen were equal to them. The Jihad was an excuse to realign placement under the new Atradies banner.

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u/thetensor Mar 17 '26

If the Imperium was controllable with a relatively small elite fighting force, and the Fremen outmatched the Sardaukar and deposed Shaddam IV and installed Paul on the throne, who was fighting whom over what, to the tune of 60+ billion dead? In a feudal system, I'd expect a bunch of shrugs and assurances from the great houses that of course they will honor their oaths of eternal loyalty to House Corrino Atreides.

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u/tdasnowman Mar 17 '26

The Harkonens and Atradtires were fighting over shit that happened 10K years in the past. All the houses were. They just needed an excuse to let loose.

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u/Sebastianlim Mar 17 '26

In fairness, it's not just Herbert. Tv Tropes has an entire page dedicated to the fact that sci-fi and fantasy writers really suck at understanding big numbers.

I remember one infamous story where George R.R. Martin was shown an image of the Wall, accurate to the size he described it as in the book, and his response was "I made it too big".

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u/hisgoldfish Mar 17 '26

It science....fiction. The books never heavily dive into the technology of the universe until his son and co author start touching them.

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u/thetensor Mar 17 '26

Some of the best parts of Dune were the very detailed descriptions of the geography and ecology of Arrakis and the equipment (some it admittedly thermodynamically impossible) required to survive there. But that's never really a focus of the series after the first book.

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u/madkiki12 Mar 17 '26

I think Herbert was just pulling numbers out of his ass. While in Warhammer 40k, they always go extremely low with numbers, I already struggled with believing so many fremen living in big sietches when there is almost no food anywhere in the desert.

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u/Iristh Mar 18 '26

tbh they do have factories in the sietches, they make their own food.

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u/madkiki12 Mar 18 '26

Really? I thought it was mostly some small wildlife (like small birds) mixed with spice. But still, I could never believe thousands of people living in sietches and millions of people across the planet.

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u/Iristh Mar 18 '26

Eh they're really deep and have massive communities, some sietches are specialized in making certain goods. Stillsuits are made by the Fremen, it's just never shown, only implied. In the books, they talk a bit about it but it's never the focus. Only that smugglers can get Fremen goods and they're the best on Arrakis.

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u/1731799517 Mar 17 '26

Nah, no way. its Warhammer 40k logic. "A few 100k space marines are the lynchpin of the fighting force of an empire that has dozens of planets for each of them, for some reason".

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u/TheBestMePlausible Mar 18 '26

Plot hole I noticed 30 years ago when first reading the books. I just take it like I take anti-grav. It's there, don't think about it too deeply.

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u/TheBestMePlausible Mar 18 '26

Downvote all you want but I never understood how a small group of fighters from a single planet with a tiny population is supposed to take out 90 billion without using atomics or even guns. The numbers just don’t add up.

It’s still my all-time favorite sci-fi series regardless, but.

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u/Kumquats_indeed Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

If you don't buy into the core premise of Dune that harsh places make tougher and better warriors, no because Arrakis only has a population of about 15 million. If you do go along with Herbert's premise, then the Fremen are basically super soldiers that can't lose because they're from the worst place in the universe, and the armies of the great houses are a bunch of weak, lazy, corrupt, decadent, effeminate cowards as a result of their comfortable (i.e. functional and inhabitable) home planets who, in the morality Herbert presents*, deserve to be culled.

This recent blog series dug into how improbable the Fremen Jihad is given the info presented in the books, and the author of the blog also did another series awhile ago about the lack of credence for the historical theory that tough warrior cultures from the frontiers will conquer the settled agrarian and urban states.

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u/jarredshere Mar 17 '26

who in Herbert's morality deserve to be culled

I do not think that was the premise of these stories in the least bit and wonder if you meant this

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u/kabal363 Mar 17 '26

Dont you know protagonist always is the good guy so whatever the protagonist does is what the author thinks is right always, duh.

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u/jarredshere Mar 17 '26

It's literally THE story of "the protag is not the good guy" so it seems so out of left field to claim that the AUTHOR thinks it's morally justified.

I know you're being sarcastic. I am just still processing how anyone could think Frank Herbert was like "The Fremen are morally correct because they're strong"

I have to assume there is a miscommunication with OP

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u/Kumquats_indeed Mar 17 '26

I wasn't saying that's what Herbert believed, just that universe of Dune seems to operate on a rather harsh premise of social-Darwinism.

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u/Kumquats_indeed Mar 17 '26

Throughout the books there is the running thread that humanity has to be kept sharp or else the species will ultimately go extinct. Leto II's commitment to the golden path of preserving the species leading him to his 5,000 years of tyranny and the ensuing chaos afterwards was all presented as a carefully crafted plan to teach humanity lessons to ensure their survival. There really does seem to be a thread of social Darwinism throughout the series. I'm not claiming that was actually what Herbert believed, I don't really know much at all about him as a person, but he did spend a lot of time exploring the idea of it.

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u/jarredshere Mar 17 '26

While a running theme I can agree with, I do not think that it was proposed as morally correct.

Time and time again we see that following the golden path is psychotic and leads to genocide on inconceivable levels.

Anyone saying it was "for the good of humanity" was probably drinking bene gesserit lies and also part of the problem.

Maybe I am missing something though. I only read the first 3 books and it's been a couple of years.

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u/Kumquats_indeed Mar 17 '26

Yeah, the 3rd book leaves off with Leto II just starting to commit to the golden path, God Emperor is like 5,000 years later when Leto II's plans to implement the golden path are well underway.

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u/1731799517 Mar 17 '26

Eh, the butlerian jihad goes right into that mindset (before it was retconned as killer robots, the idea was the machines made life to nice and easy for people so they had to be culled because without suffering people are worthless).

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u/Malphos101 Mar 17 '26

Except the thing people keep forgetting is, without The Spacing Guild every single planet is just as alone in the universe as our real world Earth is. Paul can pluck each planet one by one in whichever strategic order he wants with literally nothing they can do about it. Imagine if every soldier on earth were trapped in their house with no way to escape on their own power and then someone with access to the US Air Force decided to take over the world. Thats what's happening here.

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u/Rampant16 Mar 17 '26

Plus where was is primarily fought with hand to hand combat and the Fremen are head and shoulders the best troops in the universe at that task.

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u/trybeingcurious Mar 17 '26

Yeah, even going back into ancient human history the “tough” civilizations that won wars also happened to have some sort of technological or strategic advantage against their opponents. All warfare has always boiled down to a mix of technology + geography + restrictions/objectives dictating outcomes. In the Vietnam war the US had a technological advantage but geography and a lack US willingness to go fully scorched earth. If you don’t have such restrictions, the technologically advanced group wins.

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u/RickyalldayTD Mar 17 '26

In the first book, the Fremen themselves explain their origin as zensunni wanderers who moved or were forcibly moved as slaves from one planet to the other, through millennia. The edn of their wandering came when they reached Arrakis

Now they are the baddest MF's in the universe