Jodorowsky Dune Auction Crypto Winners Want To Do A TV Show

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Image: Chris Foss/Sony Classics

Late last year, a rare copy of one of the pitch books legendary director Alejandro Jodorowsky made to present his vision for an adaptation of Dune went up for auction. Expected to sell for $30-40,000, it cost around $3 million, thanks to an Ether-backed collective known as TheSpiceDAO. Now they want to use the manuscript to… make their own Dune.

SpiceDAO’s overwhelming bid for the book – one of the few surviving copies, some of which have previously been partially online and featured prominently in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune – was among a number of landmark auctions. for collectibles. Last year. Rare copies of the Mario and Zelda games, comic books like Spider-Man’s debut in Amazing Fantasy, and more have all generated hugely overpriced record deals, in part driven by people with more money than sense. placing speculative bids on rare collectibles as the next big thing. Christie’s sale of Jodorowsky’s Dune was no exception to this trend, although it was a blurring of another speculative trend: cryptocurrency-backed DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, bringing together millions of dollars from backing crypto owners in an attempt to buy something and the web3-ifier to some nebulous extent. There was a failed attempt to buy the US Constitution and plans to turn Blockbuster into a future streaming service by similar DAOs, and now there’s SpiceDAO. The difference with SpiceDAO’s plans, however, is that they suddenly think spending three million dollars just means they own Dune.

SpiceDAO drew a lot of attention – mostly scorn – over the weekend by reiterating their plans for Jorowsky’s Dune after it was purchased. The first, releasing the book to the public with a new digitized copy while the purchased physical book is stored in “fine art grade storage with professional service assured”, is admirable, if not, as previously mentioned, something that doesn’t has never arrived with other copies of the book before. The problem is the other two plans, which are to turn the storyboards illustrated by Moebius into an animated series to be sold to a streaming service, and then, having done so as well, to encourage spin-off projects based on the manuscript of the crypto enthusiasts who backed the bid in first place.

Except, of course, Jodorowsky’s Dune is still Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel. Buying a book of storyboards – one of many out there, even if that number is small – and expecting that transferring the rights to those storyboards, or the story itself, would have been like whoever bought this copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 last year expecting them to go to Sony and direct Spider-Man: Are We Still Doing Home Puns?. Or, maybe, you walk into a bookstore, pick up one of those reissued copies of Dune with Denis Villeneuve’s movie cast on the cover, and think you might approach Timothée Chalamet and tell him how the chapter two is yours now.

SpiceDAO at least, in other avenues, has admitted that this would be a significant barrier to adaptation, and instead intends to lean more towards creating something work-inspired instead. “Jodorowsky’s expansive vision for Dune has kind of planted the seeds for nearly every sci-fi project over the past 50 years. Although we don’t own the intellectual property for Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, we are in a unique position with the opportunity to create our own addition to the genre as a tribute to the giants that have come before us,” the DAO wrote on its own Medium page in the wake of the auction at the end of the Any project resulting from the SpiceDAO purchase should delicately toe the line of homage not only to Herbert’s work – and now the work of a major Hollywood studio from Warner Bros. – but also to the legal rights of the Estate of Jodorowsky, Estate of Moebius and others involved in the original pitch itself But then why would SpiceDAO need to buy Jodorowsky’s pitch bible to create something simply inspired by Dune and the ‘ aesthetic that Jodorowsky and his collaborators envisioned, if they were so determined to create an original work?

Maybe the answer is that you couldn’t execute an ancillary attempt to get the crypto enthusiasts who backed the bid in the first place to invest in your own Dune-themed cryptocurrency that way, didn’t is this not ? After all, the spice has to flow one way or the other.

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