Movies Like
Movies Like Dune: Twelve Epics That Build a World and Trust You
By Jordan A. · · Updated · 6 min read
What people usually mean when they ask for movies like Dune is not "more sand". They mean a film confident enough to withhold. Denis Villeneuve gives you a political system, an ecology and a religion before he gives you a fight, and he trusts you to keep up. That patience is the thing to match.
So the filter here is narrow. Each pick has to build a world with rules that hold, treat scale as something felt rather than announced, and let quiet stretches do real work. Twelve films clear it. Each entry says what it shares with Dune, where it diverges, who it's for, and a fact you can check.
The closest relatives
Dune: Part Two is the obvious first stop if you somehow stopped after the first film. It's the back half of one adaptation, and it turns Paul's rise into something closer to horror than triumph.
2024, directed by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, the second half of a two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel.
Who it's for: anyone who liked the first film's politics more than its spectacle. The difference is momentum. Part Two has a plot that finally moves.
Blade Runner 2049 is Villeneuve doing the same trick in a wetter, colder register. Nearly three hours, almost no exposition, and a future built out of weather and advertising rather than dialogue.
2017, directed by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, sequel to the 1982 film, starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford.
Who it's for: viewers who want Dune's compositional patience with a detective story underneath. It's sadder and smaller in scope.
Arrival is the third Villeneuve on this list and the least like Dune on the surface, since almost nothing explodes. It's about a linguist doing her job carefully, and the worldbuilding is grammatical rather than geographic.
2016, directed by Denis Villeneuve, written by Eric Heisserer from Ted Chiang's 1998 novella "Story of Your Life", starring Amy Adams.
Who it's for: people who liked that Dune took its invented language seriously. Skip if you need scale.
The originals everyone is copying
2001: A Space Odyssey invented the grammar Villeneuve is using. Long holds, silence where a score should be, and a plot that refuses to explain itself. Half the shots in modern sci-fi are quoting it.
1968, produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with Arthur C. Clarke, drawing on Clarke's short stories including "The Sentinel" (1951).
Who it's for: anyone building a foundation. The difference from Dune is that Kubrick has no interest in characters at all.
Solaris is the 1972 Soviet film, not the American remake. Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Stanisław Lem's novel into something closer to a haunting than a space movie, with a station orbiting a planet that reads its crew's memories back to them.
1972, co-written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, based on Lem's 1961 novel, starring Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk, with an electronic score by Eduard Artemyev.
Who it's for: the patient. It is slower than Dune by a wide margin and the payoff is emotional, not narrative.
Stalker is Tarkovsky again, seven years later, and it's the purest worldbuilding film ever made in the sense that almost nothing is explained. A guide leads two men through a forbidden Zone toward a room that grants wishes. The rules are enforced by dread.
1979 Soviet film, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, screenplay by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, loosely based on their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic.
Who it's for: viewers who want the Dune experience with the budget removed and the atmosphere doubled.
Blade Runner is where the modern lived-in future starts. Ridley Scott's Los Angeles is crowded, rainy and indifferent, and the film assumes you'll work out its economy from the background.
1982, directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, adapted from Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
Who it's for: anyone who wants the ancestor of the 2049 you liked. Choose a cut and commit.
Scale done honestly
Interstellar is the most Dune-adjacent blockbuster of the last fifteen years: a family drama attached to a plan to save the species, with real physics doing structural work. It was shot by Hoyte van Hoytema, which matters because the film's texture comes from actual film stock and practical sets rather than cleanup in post.
2014, directed by Christopher Nolan, co-written with Jonathan Nolan, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain.
Who it's for: people who want the emotional register Dune keeps at arm's length. It's much more sentimental.
Avatar: The Way of Water gets sneered at and then makes another billion dollars, and the reason is exactly the Dune reason: Cameron spends an hour teaching you how a place works before he puts anything at risk.
2022, directed by James Cameron, written by Cameron with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, the second film in the Avatar series, starring Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña.
Who it's for: viewers who want the ecology-as-character idea taken literally. The dialogue is much weaker than Dune's.
Mad Max: Fury Road shares Dune's desert and almost nothing else in method, and that contrast is the point. George Miller builds his world entirely through props, dialects and vehicle design while never stopping the chase.
2015 Australian film, co-written, co-produced and directed by George Miller, with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris on the screenplay, the fourth Mad Max film.
Who it's for: anyone who found the first Dune too slow. This is the same density delivered at speed.
Two that go smaller and stranger
Annihilation takes a team into a zone where biology has stopped behaving, and it commits to an ending that refuses to resolve. It's cosmic horror with a science fiction budget.
2018, written and directed by Alex Garland, loosely based on Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel, starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson and Oscar Isaac.
Who it's for: Stalker fans who want a shorter, more frightening version.
Children of Men builds a collapsed near-future almost entirely in the corners of the frame, with news tickers and cages doing what a Dune voiceover would do. Its long takes made a generation of directors want to try.
2006, directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, based on P. D. James' 1992 novel, starring Clive Owen.
Who it's for: people who want worldbuilding that is entirely political and completely unglamorous.
Where these stream
Rights on the older titles in particular move around, and the Tarkovsky films drift between arthouse services and rental. Where each film streams changes, so the title page on BingeNext shows current US options.
Start here
If you want the same director, go Blade Runner 2049 then Arrival. If you want the film Dune is descended from, 2001. If you want to be genuinely unsettled, Stalker. If you want scale without the slow build, Fury Road.
If the harder problem is that you've seen most of these and want the next one, tell BingeNext's movie mode which three of these you loved. It comes back with picks, a reason for each, and where they stream, in about a minute.
Topics covered: sci-fi, epic, blockbuster, adaptation, worldbuilding, visual-spectacle
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and is responsible for every guide published on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu. Dates, season counts and where-to-watch details in these guides are checked against official sources before publishing, and corrections are welcome at Jordan@Bingenext.com.