Dune 2’s Best Picture Nomination Is A Historic First For One Reason
Sci-fi films have been nominated for Best Picture before. But not quite like this.
Before Dune: Part Two picked up a Best Picture nomination at the 2025 Oscars, there had only been 15 science fiction films ever to get that Oscar nod. One of those includes Dune: Part One, released in 2021 and nominated for Best Picture in 2022. It didn’t win, but then again, sci-fi movies rarely win Best Picture at the Oscars. Famously, even Star Wars lost in 1978 to Annie Hall. So, historically, it's unlikely that Dune: Part Two has even an outside chance of winning Best Picture, despite being nominated. And yet, this nomination is historic for one major reason: It represents the first time that the same science fiction story has been nominated for Best Picture twice.
On January 23, the nominations for the 97th Academy Awards featured a lot of horror films in the mix, and some sci-fi in the VFX category (Alien: Romulus.) But in terms of full-on, outer space sci-fi movies, only Dune: Part Two got the Best Picture nod. You may think this is the first sci-fi sequel to get nominated for Best Picture, but you’d be forgetting Mad Max: Fury Road’s nomination in 2016. (We’re also not counting the various Lord of the Rings Best Picture nominations, because those films are fantasy, not science fiction.) Avatar: The Way of Water was also nominated for Best Picture, and that’s a sci-fi sequel, too.
That said, taken together, Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, are on a short list of sci-fi films to get Best Picture nominations that are also based on popular novels. Others in this small club include A Clockwork Orange (nominated in 1972) and The Martian (nominated in 2016), based on the novels by Anthony Burgess and Andy Weir, respectively. But neither A Clockwork Orange or The Martian were adapted into two parts, meaning, those novels never had a second chance for their film adaptations to win Best Picture.
This is the strange thing about Dune: Part Two. It’s not really a sequel to the first film, it’s simply the rest of the first novel in book form, which means, in a sense, it's the same movie getting nominated again, four years later. Historically, the only other good example of this, even outside of science fiction is Lord of the Rings, because each of those three installments was nominated for Best Picture, but only the third film, Return of the King, won. But, even that comparison isn’t quite the same, because although hardcore Tolkien heads will tell you that The Lord of the Rings is all one book, divided up into three volumes (and those volumes contain two parts each), the real-world reality is that those were all published as separate books, and the Peter Jackson film adaptations (more or less) reflect that reality.
Though director Denis Villeneuve wasn’t able to score a Best Director nod, he has made history with Dune: Part Two. Again.
Although Frank Herbert did publish the original Dune in installments in Analog magazine, and at one point, toyed with publishing the first novel as more than one volume the, hardcore reality is that the story presented by these two Denis Villeneuve is taken from one book. This would be like if Greta Gerwig had made Little Women and Little Women: Part Two, and both films had been nominated for Best Picture. We’re dealing with the same source material, and an adaptation of the rest of a story that, again, is being honored with the same kind of status.
Now, of course, Dune: Part Two is a very different film than Part One, but broadly speaking, that simulates the experience of reading the first novel too. Whether or not Frank Herbert would have loved the way Part Two ends, at least in contrast with his novel, is unknowable. But here in the 21st century, even those hardcore fans who didn’t love Dune: Part Two can agree that the cinematic conclusion of this story is effective, emotional, and definitive.
Dune: Part Two probably won’t take home the Oscar for Best Picture. But just like the beloved sci-fi novel from which it came, it has made very unique history. And this one-of-a-kind achievement is unlikely to be topped, ever again.
