The internet is ablaze with love for Dune: Part Two, from fawning reviews to Lisan al-Gaib memes. Among this sandy chaos emerged someone who may already be the film's number one fan, having seen Dune: Part Two over 10 times since it opened.
Twitter/X user Mac, a 20-year-old student based in New York, has kept a record of his Dune: Part Two viewings, simply tweeting "round [x] imax" accompanied by a gif from the film. While the posts started out with modest engagement, they quickly ballooned to gain thousands of likes, and hundreds of thousands (even millions) of post views.
Tweet may have been deleted
"It's so weird," Mac told Mashable over a phone call. "I was expecting 20 likes, honestly. I don't know what round it was, maybe five or six, that I tweeted that, and it just blew up. People were either getting really mad at me, or they were saying that I was funding Dune Messiah, which I thought was really funny. I haven't really cared too much about people that got mad at me."
Mac's Dune fandom runs deep. He read Frank Herbert's novel in 2018, then immersed himself in any updates about the upcoming adaptation, which Denis Villeneuve signed on to direct in 2017. For Mac, an avid fan of the director's work (his favorite non-Dune Villeneuve films are Arrival and Blade Runner 2049), the Dune-Villeneuve announcement was a match made in heaven.
All the anticipation for the first Dune paid off for Mac, who has seen it over 200 times. He estimates around 20 of those viewings were in theaters. Since Warner Bros. released Dune simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max (now just Max), he would also rewatch on the streaming service. "I have the script memorized," he said. "I used to write it out during school when I got bored."
While Mac isn't quite at the level of having Dune: Part Two completely committed to memory yet, he's at the point where he knows what words are coming before they're even spoken. More importantly than memorization, though, is his newfound appreciation of the film on each go-through.
"There were a lot of changes from the book that I wasn't 100 percent on board with at first, but after the second and third viewing, it definitely started to make sense to me that [Villeneuve] made these cuts for the sake of a better movie," Mac explained.
He touched on the character of Paul's (Timothée Chalamet's) sister, Alia (Anya Taylor-Joy), as an example. In Herbert's Dune, Alia is a toddler with all the abilities and cognizance of a full-grown Bene Gesserit — a challenge to bring to film, to say the least. "What [Villeneuve] did with Alia, some people are so upset with, but it would have been super, super weird," said Mac. "Seeing what they did with [Alia] in the David Lynch movie, I don't know if that would fit the tone of Denis Villeneuve's movie, or even translate to cinematic language well."
Another change that resonated with Mac was the ending's renewed focus on Chani (Zendaya) and her decision to leave Paul after his conquest of Arrakis and proposal of marriage to Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh). "That expression is so haunting. It will linger with audiences around the world, and it really set up Dune Messiah well," Mac said. While Dune Messiah has yet to be greenlit, Mac is already looking forward to what's coming next, especially the tension between Chani and Irulan, and the Bene Gesserit conspiracy to take down Paul.
As for the actual logistics of viewing Dune: Part Two 10 times, Mac has planning these viewings for months: saving up, using his Regal Unlimited pass, and requesting time off work to catch opening weekend screenings. (Luckily, none of them were the cursed 3:15 am showing.) He also attended the film's fan first screening on Feb. 25, which he called "one of the best moviegoing experiences, if not the best."
"I showed up to that theater around 30 minutes early and was talking to everybody about Dune and their experiences with Dune and how they've come to appreciate the story," Mac said. "Everyone was from different age groups, and it was so cool to see their perspective on it."
So what comes next in Mac's Dune: Part Two journey? He plans to watch the movie in theaters over 20 times. When I asked him if he thought Dune: Part Two would end up breaking his 200 viewings of Dune, though, he laughed. "I hope not!"
"I've got to take a break for a little bit, because I got sick of being in the theater for 10 screenings in a row," he said in our March 5 interview. The day before that, on March 4, he posted, "probably gonna take a dune break for a week after this."
Two days later, on March 6, he tweeted a fateful, "round 11 imax." Clearly, the call of Arrakis is too hard to resist.
Dune: Part Two is now in theaters.
