Jodorowsky’s Dune Book

A Crypto group has just paid £2.2 million for Jodorowsky’s dune book. The plan is to make the book public, as well as develop it into an original animated limited series and sell it to a streaming service. Although they have ownership of the book the group does not poses the intellectual property rights to disrupt copies of the book or adapt it into another medium. Some people believe that the groups ultimate plan is to sell the pages of the book as NFT’s. Spice DAO have offered no actual proof that they are purchasers or why they paid more than the 35,000 Euro price. It is believed that Spice DAO’s co-founder, millionaire Soban Saqib, put up the bulk of the purchase fee from his own funds.  

The book came from the private collection of an individual and those bids were taken on the day from the room, by phone and online. Spice DAO seemed to concede that they did not have any rights to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel – and instead were ploughing ahead with creating an original animated series. However, this has sparked a legal battle between the creators and the estate of Frank Herbert as they do onto own the intellectual property right to produce an adaptation of Dune.

Jodorowsky acquired the rights for Dune in 1974 for a 15-hour epic film. Jodorowsky failed to get financial backing for his film and thus the project died although its legacy lives on.