Johan Renck will be directing the first episodes of HBOMax’s Dune television spinoff, Dune: The Sisterhood.
Dune director Denis Villeneuve was first touted as directing the series’s pilot when it the project was first announced. While there is no word as to why he is no longer helming the project, it is likely that he is too busy with the pre-production of the upcoming Dune: Part Two. Jon Spaihts, who co-wrote Dune with Villeneuve, was originally set to showrun the series but stepped down last year, with Diane Ademu-John coming in to replace him.
Set 10,000 years before the events of the film, Dune: The Sisterhood will explore the origins of the Bene Gesserit, a religious sisterhood of women in the Dune universe who possess certain powers that some mistake for magic. The group’s ultimate goal is a clandestine long-term breeding program to create a messiah, a program that comes to fruition early in the novel Dune.
Frank Herbert’s original Dune novels never really delved into the Sisterhood’s beginnings, though some of the subsequent prequel books penned by his son Brian Herbert and science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson did explore that time period. It remains to be seen if Dune: The Sisterhood will draw its storylines from those books or if it will forge their own.
Renck’s resume includes music videos for Madonna, Byonce and David Bowie before he moved onto episodic television, directing installments of such series as The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Vikings and Chernobyl. Currently, he is shooting the science-fiction adventure film Spaceman with Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Isabella Rossellini, Kunal Nayyar, and Paul Dano and presumably will move onto Dune: The Sisterhood once that wraps.
