Film
Jodorowsky's Dune
A rollicking, heartbreaking documentary about the greatest science-fiction film never made. Alejandro Jodorowsky, riding high off El Topo, assembled Dali, Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, H.R. Giger and Moebius to build a Dune of pure hallucination — then watched it collapse. Frank Pavich's film is talking-heads storytelling at its most electric: a eulogy for a movie that somehow shaped the next fifty years of sci-fi anyway.
If you liked this
Lost in La Mancha2002
The other great documentary about a doomed passion project — Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote adaptation falling apart in real time, storm by storm, disaster by disaster. Same genre of heartbreak, same addictive spectacle of a vision collapsing.
But Watching someone's dream die twice in one lifetime might be enough for you.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse1991
Coppola's Apocalypse Now nearly destroyed everyone involved, and this making-of doc — built from his wife's own footage — captures the madness with an intimacy Jodorowsky's Dune only wishes it had access to.
But It's about a film that actually got finished, so the stakes and shape are different — less pure fantasia, more survival story.

Burden of Dreams1982
Werner Herzog dragging a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon, for real, is the closest cinema has to Jodorowsky's scale of obsession. This is the documentary that watches a director's sanity fray in front of the camera.
But Grim and gruelling rather than exhilarating — Herzog's project actually finished, but at a cost that's hard to shake.

The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
American Movie1999
Same engine as Jodorowsky's Dune — an artist chasing an impossible vision against money and logic — but in a completely different register: scrappy, homemade, and gut-bustingly human instead of mythic.
Swap continents, budgets and cosmic ambition for a Wisconsin garage and a horror short called Coven, and you get the same obsessive, doomed creative fever — just shrunk down to a scale that's funnier and sadder in equal measure.
But No movie stars, no cosmic scale, no grandeur — just a broke guy in the snow trying to finish his film, which is either the whole point or a dealbreaker.

More like this (8)
Alien1979
H.R. Giger's biomechanical nightmares, built for Dune, found their real home here instead. Watching this after the doc feels like seeing the ghost project's DNA finally get to walk around on screen.
But If you're after another artist-obsession story, this is just the finished film — no making-of chaos, no interviews.

Dune2021
Denis Villeneuve finally gives Herbert's novel the scale and solemnity Jodorowsky wanted to give it decades earlier — a fascinating what-actually-happened companion piece to what nearly did.
But Cool, austere and reverent where Jodorowsky's version would have been unhinged and psychedelic — tonally almost the opposite film.

Dune: Part Two2024
The sequel that completes Villeneuve's vision with even bigger sandworms and bloodier politics — worth it just to see how differently two visionaries can read the same book.
But Requires having seen Part One, and it's a very different animal from Jodorowsky's surrealist fever dream.

The Holy Mountain1973no page yet
Jodorowsky's own maximalist masterpiece, made right before Dune fell apart — every wild idea from his Dune pitch is already visible here, undiluted and unfunded by nobody.
But Deliberately shocking, structureless and hallucinatory — this is arthouse provocation, not narrative comfort food.
El Topo1970no page yet
The cult Western that made Jodorowsky famous enough to get handed a blank cheque for Dune in the first place — see the maniac behind the myth in his breakout film.
But Violent, surreal, and deliberately alienating; a midnight-movie curiosity more than an easy watch.
The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?2015no page yet
Another lavishly documented film-that-never-was, this time Tim Burton's bizarre 90s Superman with Nicolas Cage — proof Hollywood keeps generating these glorious ghosts.
But Lower budget and narrower scope than Jodorowsky's Dune — a fun curio rather than a landmark documentary.
Metropolis1927
It's the ancestor visual-sci-fi film that finished what it started — a look at what Jodorowsky's Dune might have become had fate gone the other way, decades earlier, in a wholly different film language.
Fritz Lang's silent epic is the era-defining proof that a visionary sci-fi film could actually get made and survive to reshape everything after it — the design DNA that runs straight through to Jodorowsky's own dreams.
But Silent, sometimes stiff by modern pacing standards, and its surviving prints have famous gaps — a patience test for casual viewers.

Fantastic Planet1973no page yet
Same continent, same year, same Moebius-adjacent visual imagination that fed Jodorowsky's designers — proof the aesthetic he chased could survive, just in a stranger, smaller medium.
Made the exact same year Jodorowsky's Dune imploded, this stop-motion French-Czech animation channels the identical strain of psychedelic European sci-fi surrealism — but it actually got finished, frame by painstaking frame.
But Slow, eerie, and unmistakably 70s in its animation style — a mood piece more than a plot-driven watch.
People
Cast
Alejandro JodorowskySelf - Writer / Filmmaker
Michel SeydouxSelf - Film Producer- Chris FossSelf - Artist
H. R. GigerSelf - Artist- Jean-Paul GibonSelf - Film Producer
Brontis JodorowskySelf - Actor
Amanda LearSelf - Singer / Dali's Muse- Christian WanderSelf - Singer
Devin FaraciSelf - Film Critic- Diane O'BannonSelf - O'Bannon's Widow
Drew McWeenySelf - Film Critic
Gary KurtzSelf - Film Producer
Directing
- Frank PavichDirector
Production
- Alex RicciardiAssociate Producer
- Michel SeydouxCo-Producer
- Donald RosenfeldExecutive Producer
- Frank PavichProducer
- Stephen ScarlataProducer
- Travis StevensProducer
- Adam GoodmanProduction Assistant
- Tavo PazosProduction Assistant
Recommended by
Dune, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, Lost in La Mancha, Burden of Dreams, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Dune, The Movies That Made Us