There is a film from the 1970s that never shot a single frame, never sold a single ticket, and is still called one of the most influential science fiction movies ever attempted. The movie even influenced veteran filmmaker Ridley Scott‘s 1979 classic, Alien.
The movie in question is cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s version of Dune. Its fingerprints show up most clearly in Scott’s greatest work of all time, which has now arrived on Netflix on September 1, 2026, alongside James Cameron’s Aliens.
What happened to Jodorowsky’s Dune? The short version of a very long heartbreak is that the director spent roughly two years building the film in pre-production, assembling a crew of artists he called his spiritual warriors.
Their work was bound into a storyboard book the size of a phone directory and mailed to every major studio in Hollywood. They all ignored Jodorowsky’s movie, but quietly borrowed elements from his work.
Ridley Scott’s Alien Featured Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune Team
Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) | Credits: 20th Century-Fox
There is no denying the fact that Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien borrowed heavily from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. The movie, which came a few years after Jodorowsky’s movie fell through, even included some of the artists whom the director had tapped for his movie. These similarities were covered by the documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Jodorowsky had hired American writer Dan O’Bannon as his special effects supervisor after watching Dark Star, the scrappy low-budget film O’Bannon made with John Carpenter. When Dune collapsed, O’Bannon went back to Los Angeles, broke and demoralised.
He channeled that wreckage into a screenplay, which he wrote with Ronald Shusett. It eventually became Scott’s Alien. O’Bannon was also the one who called his old Dune crew to work on this movie.
H.R. Giger had been painting the home world of House Harkonnen for Jodorowsky. When he joined Alien, he brought the same nightmare style to creating the Xenomorph, the derelict ship, and the Space Jockey. He was part of the team that won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for the movie.
Chris Foss, who had been designing Jodorowsky’s spacecraft, was brought in to work on the look of the Nostromo. Then there was Jean Giraud, the French comic artist, who worked shot by shot with Jodorowsky. He drew a storyboard of roughly 3,000 panels that covered the entire film from start to finish, with notes on camera angles, movement, and dialogue.
Giraud is the reason why Jodorowsky’s Dune script reads like a completed movie sitting on paper. Giraud carried that same eye over to Alien, where he designed the bulky pressure suits the Nostromo crew wears when they step onto the planet’s surface.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Unreleased Dune Also Inspired Other Classic Movies
A still from Jodorowsky’s Dune | Credits: Sony Pictures Classics
To understand the reach of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, you have to understand the scale of what was planned. Fresh off El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky was handed creative freedom by French producer Michel Seydoux. He picked Dune without having read it.
His cast was absurd in the best way. It included Salvador Dalí as Emperor Shaddam IV, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha, David Carradine as Duke Leto, and his own 12-year-old son Brontis as Paul Atreides.
Dalí demanded $100,000 an hour, so Jodorowsky trimmed the role to a single hour of filming and planned to cover the rest with an animatronic double. Welles only agreed after being promised meals from his favourite Paris restaurant every day of the shoot.
For the score, Jodorowsky wanted two bands. He wanted both Pink Floyd and the French progressive outfit Magma. He famously pushed his way into Floyd’s studio to make his pitch.
Jodorowsky would not cut his runtime, which estimates put at anywhere between 10 and 14 hours. The budget kept swelling, and nobody wanted to hand that much money to a director this uncompromising. But the book was already out there, sitting in every major studio in town.
The documentary builds its case with a montage that lines up Jean Giraud’s panels against finished films, and the list of inspirations is long. Star Wars comes up most often. Luke’s training session with the floating remote mirrors storyboards of Paul sparring with a robot.
The robot’s point-of-view panels appear to anticipate the T-800’s red-tinted vision in The Terminator. Ming’s throne room in Flash Gordon resembles Jodorowsky’s Senate. The documentary further points to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the 1987 Masters of the Universe, and Robert Zemeckis’ Contact.
Jodorowsky and Giraud reused a chunk of their designs and ideas in The Incal, the comic series they launched in the 1980s. The greatest film never made ended up making a lot of other films instead.
What do you think of Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune and its influence on Alien and other movies? Let us know in the comments below!
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