it was De Laurentiis production so the monumental shitshow was more or less baked in. Dino been trying to get the Dune project off the ground since the mid 1970s and there was a lot of sunk cost tacked onto it by the time Lynch got onboard. Lynch famously passed on directing The Return of the Jedi because in the end of the day it was going to be George calling the shots. So Dino did his Svengali trick and talked David into directing Dune with the promise of reasonable creative control.

The thing is - they started on the wrong foot from the get go. Originally, the plan was to split the book in two movies. That's how the initial drafts were written (the very first one even had some Herbert's input) - story wise it was closer to the Villeneuve - it ended on the Harkonnen takeover with the rest set aside for the sequel. By the time they started crunching numbers - it came to their attention that this whole two film plan is actually a giant financial risk so they had to roll it back to one movie covering the entire story. That's why the movie chugs along for the first two thirds and then races towards the end. While the production was underway - Dino pushed for preliminary works on the sequel - that's how the unfinished Dune Messiah draft ended up happening.

In the meantime - Universal and De Laurentiis started butting heads over running time and screening slots opportunities (less runtime more screenings = MOAR MONY) - so the compromises had to be made.

Because of that, after Lynch delivered his rough cut of the movie he had to shape what was initially a 4 hour assembly into a movie while it was never really planned to be a 2 hour long. The initial plan was to make it 3 hours long or at the very least 2,5 hours long. So Lynch went for vibes storytelling going hard on the visuals. Predictably, it didn't go well with the audiences. Universal got upper hand got their way. That's how infodumps ended up peppered throughout the movie. And since a lot of the stuff in the movie was conveyed purely visually - chopping it and explaining away was so challenging and frustrating at some point the process was reduced to "that'll do" approach of just sticking to basic plot point without much elaboration. So the balance was even more off. The movie tanked and took De Laurentiis company with it. But hey - we got Blue Velvet out of it.

Then a couple of years later someone at Universal found out about how Heaven's Gate got reappraised after Z Channel showed the director's cut so they decided to repeat the gambit. Except unlike Heaven's Gate - there was no director's cut to reappraise. And that's how we got the extended cut. Instead of bringing back Antony Gibbs (who edited the theatrical cut) the extended cut was thrown together by outsiders who had no intricate knowledge of the material. To make matters worse - the footage required more work to be done and it was far from just reediting and inserting back some deleted scenes and that wasn't the plan. Neither was actually restructuring the movie to meaningfully integrate the new footage. That's why the quality jumps all over the place and the movie with this start stop pacing. That's why Lynch was pissed and rightfully demanded his name to be removed.

Have you seen the SpiceDiver cut?