A Legendary Sci-Fi Writer's Most Underrated Novel Will Finally Become a Movie

Denis Villeneuve can’t stop making movies based on books. The Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 director has delivered two high-budget and polished Dune blockbusters in a row, while a third is on the way. He also has three other book adaptations in the works for when he’s finished with Paul Atreides, and the director finally gave a promising update on one of those projects that could be the perfect follow-up to Dune.

In a conversation with Vanity Fair, Villeneuve addressed the three other book-based movies he has in development: Cleopatra, based on the biography by Stacy Schiff, Nuclear War: A Scenario, based on the nonfiction book by Annie Jacobsen, and Rendezvous With Rama, based on the sci-fi novel by Arthur C. Clarke. “I'm working on Rendezvous With Rama and that screenplay is slowly moving forward,” he said.

Rendezvous with Rama isn’t nearly as well known as Clarke’s best-known novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s definitely well-suited to Villeneuve’s mystical, epic style. The first book in a series, Rendezvous with Rama follows a group of human explorers in the distant future as they explore a mysterious alien spaceship that’s hurtling towards the sun.

Unusually for its time, the novel was about alien life yet didn’t feature any actual aliens — the humans who explore the perfectly cylindrical ship don’t find any life, although they certainly find signs of it. Instead, the self-aware ship becomes like a character in its own right. The result is a portrait of a species cloaked in mystery but that could be a serious threat, a concept now common in series like 3 Body Problem.

This isn’t the first time Rama has been in development for the big screen. Morgan Freeman was looking to produce a film adaptation in the early 2000s, and David Fincher was attached to direct, but the project floundered in development hell for most of the decade before officially being declared dead in 2008. While it would have been interesting to see Fincher’s take on the project, Villeneuve seems like a strong choice to pick up the baton.

It’s certainly an on-brand project for him; in a December 2024 Empire interview, Villeneuve briefly described Rama as “Arrival on steroids.” We still don’t know much about his adaptation, including when we can expect it to arrive. But we’ve already seen Villeneuve adapt golden-age sci-fi with Dune while tackling the mysteries of aliens and life in Arrival. A movie that combines those two subjects feels like the natural next step.