Robert Pattinson's Dune: Part Three poster has fans seeing Sting from David Lynch's flop

The final marketing stretch for Dune: Part Three began this weekend with seven new character posters, and the r/movies thread on them turned into a roast within hours. The main course is Robert Pattinson's Scytale — pale, blonde, and lit like a cadaver.

"That middle one with Pattinson is ROUGH."

— a commenter on r/movies

The reply that won the thread: "That's Sting." And the comparison lands harder than a drive-by joke, because Sting is not a random celebrity — he played the blonde villain Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch's 1984 Dune, the adaptation that grossed about $31 million against a $40-million-plus budget, got disowned by its own director, and hung over the property for four decades. Denis Villeneuve's trilogy exists, commercially and spiritually, to replace that movie. Its closing campaign now features a poster that reminds people of it.

There's a layer of accidental comedy in the casting lore, too. Scytale is a Tleilaxu Face Dancer, a shapeshifter who can wear anyone's features — and of all the faces in the galaxy, the marketing department picked one that reads as the villain of the 1984 version. Villeneuve already has an acclaimed Feyd of his own, Austin Butler, bald and black-toothed in Part Two; the Sting lookalike arriving one movie later is pure friendly fire.

The rest of the roast

Pattinson isn't the only target. Florence Pugh's Irulan poster — the princess rendered in muddy brown murk — got summarized by one commenter as Pugh looking like she "just got out of a septic tank." Timothée Chalamet's scarred, hooded Paul and Anya Taylor-Joy's Alia fared better, but the thread's tone is set by the jokes, not the praise.

The sharpest-eyed reaction isn't a joke at all. Seven posters, and none for Rebecca Ferguson's Lady Jessica — and book readers in the thread point out why that absence reads like a spoiler: Jessica doesn't appear in Dune Messiah, the novel this film adapts. Villeneuve brought Ferguson back anyway, for what's reported as a single scene, so the poster count quietly matches the page count.

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What the stumble is measured against

This is the same campaign that could do no wrong in the spring. The first trailer dropped March 17, 2026, alongside the first poster wave; IMAX 70mm tickets for 19 locations went on sale April 6 and sold out within minutes, eight months before release. The franchise sits on $1.12 billion worldwide and eight Oscars.

Which is what makes this weekend notable: it's the first Dune: Part Three drop that got laughed at. The film opens December 18, head-to-head with Avengers: Doomsday, and Warner Bros. has seven weeks to make the internet's mental image of its villain Pattinson again, not Sting.

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