Is the new Dune 2 poster supposed to look like a meme?

While it might have been met with rave reviews over the last few days, Denis Villeneuve's Dune 2 has proven pretty weird from a marketing perspective. Earlier this month the official Dune 2 X account gave us the most uncomfortable trailer I've ever seen. And now it's dropped a bizarre poster that many are comparing to a meme.

The new character banner image features Dave Bautista's Rabban and Josh Brolin's Gurney, two characters who do battle in the latest film. But with one having tantrum as the other looks on sagely, the poster is a hilarious dead ringer for 'crying wojak vs chad' meme. 

Now, without taking you down a meme rabbit hole, said meme features a rudimentary crying face known as a 'wojack'. On the other side is a calm, blonde man known as 'Yes chad', or 'Nordic gamer'. Like all memes, there's a long, convoluted history of how this one came to exist, but in short, it's often used to represent an argument between two people, one of whom is having a literal breakdown while the other remains calm and measured. And now I will stop trying to explain a meme.

It's certainly one of the more, er, expressive movie posters we've seen in a while – and hey, it beats Marvel's boring old floating heads. Then again, while it might have given us some bizarre marketing content in recent months, Villeneuve's Dune series has also had some cracking posters.