Dune: Part Three comes out in theaters in December. It will bring to a close writer-director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy, based on the first two books in Frank Herbert’s saga.

Denis Villeneuve has proven himself to be one of the best, most visionary sci-fi directors alive. Dune has long been seen as nigh-unfilmable, but he’s turned it into a major movie franchise. And let’s not forget that he also made modern classics like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. So it means something when I say that his next project could be even better.

The director of Dune wants to get into “hard sci-fi”

Enter Rendezvous With Rama

Since 2022, Denis Villeneuve has been attached to direct Rendezvous With Rama, an adaptation of sci-fi icon Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel. In the year 2131, a system called Spaceguard detects a large object entering our solar system. But it isn’t an asteroid: it’s a huge, cylindrical craft that is 50 kilometers long and 20 kilometers in diameter, and perfectly smooth. It looks like we have first contact with extraterrestrials.

Astronauts aboard the nearby Endeavor are sent to investigate. They’re able to enter the craft, which has been named Rama after the Hindu god. Inside, they find a vast frozen sea with two plains on either side of it. There are city-like structures on the plains, which the crew names after Earth cities like London, Paris, Peking, Tokyo, Rome, and Moscow. In the center of the sea is an island, which the crew names New York, since it reminds them of Manhattan.

The crew cannot tell the purpose of the island. They don’t know where the craft is going, but they know there are microorganisms in the water. There are also lifeforms that emerge from time to time to do maintenance. And the crew discovers suits that seem to be designed for humanoid figures with three legs.

All of these things pose questions, but we never get answers. Who built the Rama? Are any of them still on board? The crew leaves without ever finding out.

Rendezvous With Rama is a lost classic waiting for the right director

Enter Denis Villeneuve

The lack of answers is one of the things that makes Rendezvous With Rama feel so realistic. The aliens in this book don’t want to befriend or wipe out humans; so far as we can tell, they don’t care about us at all, which may be even more frightening.

Upon its release, Rendezvous With Rama was criticized for being overly concerned with realism, and has since inspired many “hard” sci-fi stories. For instance, it popularized the notion of a spacecraft creating artificial gravity through rotation, something you can see at work on shows like The Expanse and For All Mankind. A real-world Spaceguard program even emerged in the early 1990s, with Clarke’s blessing.

Of course, hard sci-fi isn’t better or worse than more fanciful, space opera-type sci-fi, but it is something that Denis Villeneuve seems well-suited to tackle. “It’s an exploration where we engage with technology that could realistically exist in the future, unlike Dune, which leans more toward fantasy,” the director said in 2025. “For the first time, I’d be able to work on hard science fiction. I’d love to do that at least once in my life.”

Now is the time to make Rendezvous With Rama

It needed the Dune bump

Villeneuve may not have directed a “hard” sci-fi movie, so to speak, but his 2016 film Arrival does share some things in common with Rendezvous With Rama, namely an interest in how meeting aliens for the first time will probably be far stranger than any of us can possibly predict. Speaking to Empire in 2024, Villeneuve called the Rendezvous With Rama “Arrival on steroids.”

Villeneuve is also a good person to direct Rendezvous With Rama because, after the success of the Dune movies, he can pretty much write his own ticket. There have been attempts in the past to get Rendezvous With Rama turned into a movie, but they’ve always fallen apart, despite the involvement of well-known figures like Morgan Freeman and David Fincher. But if the most successful sci-fi director on the planet wants it, that will count for a lot.

After Dune

All that said, because he’s so successful, Denis Villeneuve has a lot on his plate after Dune: Part Three. He’s on tap to direct the next James Bond movie, and may be helming a biography about Cleopatra. When it rains, it pours, and Villeneuve is currently waterlogged.

But he’s resolved not to make any Dune movies after Part Three, and it will probably only be so long before he gets the itch to make another sci-fi film. Hopefully that film will be Rendezvous With Rama, and hopefully he’ll get the itch sooner rather than later.

Director

Denis Villeneuve

Writers

Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth, Arthur C. Clarke

Producers

Andrew A. Kosove, Broderick Johnson, Lori McCreary