In an annual tradition, we round off awards season by crowning our Most Picture. Ella Kemp hears from the Letterboxd logging Dune: Part Two up to 200 times, as well as director Denis Villeneuve and the sound and visual effects teams of this year’s most rewatched Best Picture nominee.
When we work on the movie, we are trying to put a lot of effort into different layers so you can enjoy multiple watchings: those movies are designed to do that. I’m really moved that people take the time to watch it a couple of times. That means a lot to me.
—Denis Villeneuve on Dune: Part TwoFirst the Letterboxd community’s highest-rated narrative feature of 2024, and now the recipient of two Oscars and one special Letterboxd award: our 2025 Most Picture winner, the most obsessively rewatched Best Picture nominee. Congratulations to Dune: Part Two, but, crucially, to you, our who have achieved this gargantuan feat of returning to Arrakis again, and again, and again over the past year.
That feverish appreciation has propelled Villeneuve’s picture straight into our all-time top 250 highest-rated films at #53; watched by more than 2.6 million Letterboxd and liked by more than one million, and counting. Among those, I’m sure, are many like Ilyes, who writes, “I usually rewatch my favourite films once a year, but I rewatch this every month.” Like Villeneuve, we’re not quite done with the desert, either.
Jeremiah Battle definitely isn’t: the 22-year-old filmmaker (and Letterboxd correspondent) based in New York tells me that “this movie is one that I am always thinking about.” Different places bring out different qualities: two watches on the big screen help “ingest the scope and spectacle,” while 4K Blu-ray viewing experiences allow us “to focus on the small details I may have missed in the theater.”
Battle is an emerging director in his own right, and his relationship with Dune: Part Two is one of a cinephile, no doubt, but also of something of a student. “I watched the film for the first time a couple days before I was set to make my own short film Stalemate, and I feeling simultaneously inspired but also extremely intimidated,” he recalls. “Inspired because I just watched one of the greatest films I had ever seen in my life, but equally I was intimidated because I thought to myself, ‘There’s no way I’ll ever make a movie as good as Dune: Part Two.’ It was a conflicting moment but ultimately one that motivated me to go out and make a movie of my own to the best of my ability.”
For Katie Zhu, 33, also New York-based, a glimpse of Villeneuve in conversation with Christopher Nolan for Letterboxd lit the spark of her obsession, which began with a pilgrimage to the deserts of Los Angeles.
“I convinced my friend to fly to LA with me for opening weekend to see it at the Universal Studios AMC CityWalk IMAX because I saw a video of Nolan and Denis doing a Q&A there and wanted that energy,” she tells me. “I ended up rewatching it six times in theaters.”
New York boasts one of the few 70mm IMAX theaters in the US, which helped Katie’s mission to take in as much of the film as possible. “I had to maximize my AMC A-List for my Dune: Part Two rewatches,” she says. “But if I didn’t have the access, I would still be finding a way to watch. My plans are measured in centuries. *Chani voice* This is only the beginning.”
Someone who knows a lot about voice is Dune: Part Two sound designer (and newly minted Oscar winner, alongside Gareth John, Doug Hemphill and Richard King) Ron Bartlett, who told Letterboxd in the press room at the Oscars, “We love those Dune fans, I gotta tell ya.” Big same. Speaking to the elements that hit differently across multiple mediums, Bartlett says, “It’s a big epic film, and we’re super happy that it can be enjoyed across different things like that. We love it when you see it in a theater and you see it rip, that’s our favorite thing to do. And if you can enjoy it in all other places, [more power] to you.”
One of those fans is eighteen-year-old Adam, from the US. At the time of our speaking, he’s seen the film 56 times—by the moment Villeneuve receives his Most Picture trophy on the Oscars red carpet, per Adam’s Instagram comment, he’s snuck in another three logs. “I knew from my first watch that this is my favorite film of all time,” Adam reflects to me. “Originally, the first film was my favorite until the second part came out.”
We shared Adam’s viewing habits with the Dune sound team at the Oscars: eight times in theaters, 35 more on his TV (on the 4K Blu-ray steelbook), twelve on his phone, and even once on an Apple Watch at school. “I like to rewatch the film every Tuesday morning before my classes,” Adam says of his routine. “I just like to start my day with something fun, and to make me happy for the day. I watch it every once in a while with my friend Rodrigo on Discord calls. I feel like I’ll be watching this film until the day I die, over and over again.”
But it wouldn’t be a Dune rewatch story without a parting chat from Mac, the 21-year-old New Yorker who we know and love for his 200+ viewings of Dune: Part One, and, I’m being honest here, I cannot for the life of me nail down exactly how many viewings we’re at now. “I’ve watched it like 12 times on digital since round 29. Round ‘30’ is gonna have to be when it’s back in 70mm imax,” Mac tweeted on May 24, 2024.
“When Part One came out, I saw it in theaters with my father and then the second I came home I hit play on HBO Max,” Mac tells me. “I’ve seen Part One over 200 times since then and I’m able to recite the script from memory. (On an Advanced Placement Literature test I didn’t prepare for in high school, I wrote out the entire script instead of answering the essay questions.)”
It’s not a bit: Mac knows these movies, and loves the second one with a visceral ion. “The way the sands shift, the vibration of the Ornithopters, the visual motifs Denis supplements the films with and more,” he says of his favorite details. “In a more subtextual sense, I see pieces of myself within the characters. On each watch, it’s like Denis is holding a mirror to the audience and the current climate we live in.”
Indeed, on the Oscars red carpet, Villeneuve told us upon accepting his award for Most Picture, “When we work on the movie, we are trying to put a lot of effort into different layers so you can enjoy multiple watchings: those movies are designed to do that. I’m really moved that people take the time to watch it a couple of times. That means a lot to me.”
It means a lot to Mac as well, thinking about how many more rewatches await him, and what he may be able to down to his loved ones as well. “This is a film that will be with me until I’m old, like a favorite song you constantly revisit or like Michael Caine’s Interstellar character’s relationship with the ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ poem,” he says. “If I have children, this will be a trilogy (hopefully) that I show to them, just as my father did with me for Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, which sparked my love for film.”
Mac ends on the note that we all—the Letterboxd community who keep breaking records for Villeneuve’s groundbreaking Dune duo, the Academy, BAFTA and beyond—can agree on. “These Dune films and people’s reactions to them are evidence that art trumps commercialism and that studios should be striving to hire auteurs like him to helm their ‘franchise films.’ Love and ion wins, and when films are saturated in that, they stand the test of time.” Desert power forever.
‘Dune: Part Two’ is streaming on Max now, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
