On a rooftop patio in downtown San Francisco on Thursday afternoon, tech workers from Google, Slack, X and Mozilla mingled next to a pair of cardboard Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.
Dustin Moskowitz, founder of Facebook, chatted as others sipped cocktails like the Fremen Mirage (gin, coconut cabaret, sweet vermouth) and Arrakis Palms (vanilla pear puree, gin, Fever-Tree tonic). Tim O’Reilly, a tech industry veteran, is gone. Alex Stamos, former head of security at Facebook, was also identified.
“Do you think they’ll let me take home one of the freaking buckets of sandworm popcorn?” someone in the crowd tittered. The evocatively designed bins had become a sensation on social media.
The techies were all there to celebrate Silicon Valley’s newest obsession: “Dune: Part 2,” the latest film adaptation of the Frank Herbert sci-fi epic that helped inspire many of them to get interested in technology. The film, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” sold about $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada over the weekend, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie.”
The private, invite-only screening at the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco was hosted by two former tech executives turned podcasters of “Escape Hatch,” a weekly show focused on sci-fi and fantasy films. And it wasn’t the only game in town.
Across Silicon Valley — from venture capital firms to tech executives — people had booked their own private screenings of the film, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, venture capital firm 50 Years invited founders, friends and investors to “come feed your imagination with amazing science fiction” at a theater takeover.
Founders Fund, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, rented the Alamo Drafthouse theater in San Francisco’s Mission District for the film’s opening night Friday, with an open bar and free food. Some people flew in from across the country to attend.
“If you’re a VC firm and you’re not hosting a private screening of Dune II, are you even a VC firm?” Ashlee Vance, a longtime tech journalist, wrote in a post on X last month.
Even though tech companies have cut jobs and benefits in recent months, the tradition of the sci-fi movie premiere lives on. Movies like “Star Wars,” “Dune” and “Ready Player One” were the very things that helped spark the interest of technicians in the field of computer science. No longer content to just watch the future unfold on screen, employees at companies like Meta, Google, and Palantir have begun plucking directly from their favorite movies to create the products of tomorrow.
In Google’s early days, the company would routinely buy out entire theaters to see the latest superhero movie. When “Blade Runner 2049” debuted in 2017, boutique tech investment banking firm Code Advisors rented out the Alamo Drafthouse for a private screening and had a Q. and A. with the film’s antagonist, Jared Leto. Venture capital firms have repeated the practice for other futuristic films and series, including “The Martian,” “Arrival” and HBO’s “Westworld.”
But “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” hold a special place in the hearts and minds of Silicon Valley because of the show’s expansiveness. It doesn’t hurt that “Dune” was born in San Francisco, where Mr. Herbert lived in the late 1950s as he researched what became the series of science fiction novels.
“It’s one of the original world-building exercises in genre fiction, and we’re all about world-building here,” said Jason Goldman, a former Twitter executive who teamed up with Matt Herrero, a fellow techie, to create “Apology ” podcast during the pandemic lockdown.
The “Dune: Part Two” screening events also served as a kind of safe space for techies to step away — if only for a little while — from the tech culture wars raging online and offline.
“Twenty years ago, most people who came into tech were idealists with utopian dreams,” tech veteran Tom Coates said at the Escape Hatch cocktail party. “This is clearly no longer the case – now for many it is much more just a job and one that has attracted a certain type of ‘tech bro’. But I think it’s interesting that we’re not all here tonight to watch Ayn Rand’s filmography.”
Mr. Goldman said part of Silicon Valley’s fascination with “Dune” could be due to characters like Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, a messianic figure who leads an oppressed tribal group to rise up and defeat their evil overlords. .
“What people want, what they’re always trying to recreate, is that charismatic leader with the ability to see the future,” Mr. Goldman said. “Steve Jobs’ hero worship is right up there with Paul Atreides’ fanatical praise.”
What wasn’t clear was how many of Silicon Valley’s tech elite had absorbed the finer points of the original material. Mr. Herbert was deeply skeptical of human technological progress, an outlook that framed his series.
“It’s all based on a world where artificial intelligence has been completely eliminated,” said Cal Henderson, Slack’s co-founder and chief technical officer, who attended Thursday’s party.
(That morning, Elon Musk had sued OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations that the company had put commercial interests ahead of the future of humanity. “Meta doesn’t even begin to describe it,” said another person at the party.)
However, those in attendance were determined to have fun. One presented Mr. Herrero and Mr. Goldman with a glossy, custom-printed “Dune: Part Two” poster, with the faces of the hosts photoshopped over those of the movie’s celebrities. Tables were piled high with trays of Nebula Nebulae parfaits (spiced chocolate and vanilla mousse) and platters of Atreides delicacies (rice noodles, harissa, sesame oil).
After the film, which lasted two hours and 46 minutes, the group headed to a VIP room to record a live version of the podcast about what they had just seen. The geeking continued well past midnight.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Goldman bought tickets to a Monday matinee of “Dune: Part Two.”
“I can’t wait to see it again,” he said.
