It’s been reported by Entertainment Weekly, that Pierre Morel – director of last year’s Taken, and the fun, French Parkour film, District B13, has signed on to direct the new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The movie, which was originally to be helmed by Peter Berg, kind of fell to the wayside when Berg seemed to become more interested in the (clearly higher quality) property of Battleship: The Movie. The good news is that this means Dune could get many more scenes of throat-punching.

Paramount, the studio backing the new film, is also supposedly looking for a new writer to work on incorporating the sensibilities of the French director. Morel is apparently is looking to make a much closer adaptation than the previous version of the script by Quantum of Solace screenwriter, Josh Zetumer. In case you’re not familiar, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides, and the futuristic inter-galactic feudal system involving his family’s rule of the desert planet Arrakis.

The story explores the politics, religion, technology and ecology of it’s incredible in-depth universe. The book was previously made into a movie in 1984 by David Lynch, and been brought to television through a couple of mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel.

As we sometimes say around The Flickcast HQ: “This is some funny stuff.” And sometimes, we’re actually right about that. Case in point is this parody of David Lynch’s sci-fi “masterpiece” Dune, created by YouTube user Devho89 and his pals at Sequential Pictures.

Dune, which is, of course, a big screen adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel of the same name, was met with mixed reviews and somewhat lackluster response at the box office when it hit theaters in 1984. Well, maybe the film didn’t do as well as it could have because it didn’t have these redubbed voices in it? Sure, that’s a possibly.

Judge for yourself and check out the video after the jump. Oh, and don’t forget to put your goddamn hand in the goddamn box of pain.

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Yes, you read that headline correctly. With at least one costly yet tepid mini-series and a decent, if somewhat misguided, feature film already out there based on Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, it looks like producer Kevin Misher and director Peter Berg are giving a big screen version of the novel another go. According to an interview over at io9, Misher confirmed that he and Berg are indeed working on a script for a “reboot” of the Dune franchise and expect to deliver said script shortly.

According to Misher in the article, Dune is “one of my favorite books of all time, and I made a movie with Pete (Berg) called The Rundown. . . so we decided to get back together. Pete had loved the book as well. It’s a great opportunity for us.” As for the progress they’ve made so far, Misher said: “We’re working on the script right now. We’re going to turn it in shortly. The script is coming in, we’re hoping to get a green light shortly.”

So, apparently all systems are go for a reboot of the Dune franchise. However, as much as I loved the novel and would be interested in  a new, updated feature film version, I’m not sure the guy who directed Very Bad Things and Hancock and the producer who made The Interpreter and The Scorpion King are the right guys for the job.

In my world where I run the studios, I think I would assign this task to a different team. Who would I pick? How about Christopher Nolan and Charles Roven or Zack Snyder and Lawrence Gordon?

I think either of those teams would do a bang up job. Peter Berg and Kevin Misher? I guess we’ll see.