That's why they'll dumb it down and from then on there'll be no Dune, just Brian's DUNC. I never saw the names as difficult though. Try reading some EU Star Wars books and attempt to keep track of all the aliens. Now that's hard. Dune has pretty normal names, they're just from certain cultures. Paul and Jessica are everyday ones, things like Leto and Vladimir aren't uncommon. Stilgar, Chani and Lyet are simple enough to remember. But when I was reading the Plagueis novel I couldn't keep track of half the cast, not to mention all the races. Honestly, I've never liked it when they add too many races in their fictional universes. It makes things too complicated, derivative and eventually stale.
Old HBO, not current HBO, it'd be the same thing as here. And Netflix? If I had to choose between something I like getting a Netflix adaptation ora decade-long ban across all media, I'd seriously consider the latter.
Joker also had a much smaller budget and was billed as a drama with a central MC. It was much more depressing, but also more conventional.
Meanwhile Dune is the story of an Aristocrat who goes on a revenge campaign and ends up unleashing a jihad on the entire Empire. There's literally a passage about Paul reading up on Hitler. It's why it's getting sanitised. At its core Dune is about a person with revenge on his mind. That's the bare-bones version. The themes range from environmentalism to the danger of charismatic leaders, but Paul doesn't start as some reluctant hero. And he doesn't end up as much of a "hero" either. In the Antiquity definition, that's alien to the mdoern world, yes. But at the very end he fails even there.
Dune's not more depressing, it's just more "alien". And it's why they're changing it, so that now it'll be the story of a handsome prince, reluctant to assume power, who'll fight the evil Space Nazis and help the poor and opressed "noble savages". It doesn't have the same punch and I'd argue it robs the property of its actual diversity.
