In a top-floor atrium in downtown San Francisco on Thursday night, tech workers from Google, Slack, X and Mozilla mingled next to a pair of cardboard cutouts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.
Dustin Moskovitz, a founder of Facebook, chatted while others sipped from cannily named cocktails like the Fremen Mirage (gin, coconut Campari, sweet vermouth) and the Arrakis Palms (vanilla pear purée, gin, Fever-Tree tonic). In comes Tim O’Reilly, a tech industry veteran. Alex Stamos, the former head of security at Facebook, was also spotted.
“Do you think they’ll let me take home one of the weird sandworm popcorn bucket?” someone in the crowd tittered. The suggestively designed buckets have become a sensation across social media.
The techies were all there to celebrate Silicon Valley’s latest obsession: “Dune: Part 2,” the latest film adaptation of the Frank Herbert-authored science-fiction saga, which helped inspire many of them to get interested. in technology. The film, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” sold an estimated $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 invitation-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 dedicated to sci-fi and fantasy films. And it’s not the only game in town.
Across Silicon Valley — from venture capital firms to tech executive circles — people booked their own private screenings of the film, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, the venture firm 50 Years founders, friends, and investors are invited to “fire your imagination with stellar science fiction” at the theater acquisition.
Founders Fund, a venture capital firm created by Peter Thiel, leased the Alamo Drafthouse theater in San Francisco’s Mission District for the film’s opening Friday, with an open bar and free food. Some people flew in from all over the country to attend.
“If you’re a VC firm and you’re not hosting a private screening of Dune II, are you a VC firm?” Ashlee Vance, a longtime technology journalist, wrote in a post on X last month.
Even though tech companies have cut back on jobs and perks in recent months, the tradition of the sci-fi movie premier remains alive and well. Movies like “Star Wars,” “Dune” and “Ready Player One” are the very things that helped spark techies’ interest in the field of computer science. No longer content to just watch the future on the screen, employees at companies like Meta, Google and Palantir have begun pulling directly from their favorite movies to build the products of tomorrow.
In the early days of Google, the company regularly bought out entire theaters to see the latest superhero flick. When “Blade Runner 2049” debuted in 2017, the 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 movies and series, including “The Martian,” “Arrival” and HBO’s “Westworld.”
But “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” hold a special place in Silicon Valley’s hearts and minds because of the series’ reach. “Dune” didn’t hurt then born in San Franciscowhere Mr. Herbert lived in the late 1950s while he researched what became a series of sci-fi 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 joined Matt Herrero, a techie friend, to created the “Escape Hatch” podcast during the pandemic lockdown.
The “Dune: Part Two” viewing events also acted as a kind of safe space for techies to step away — however briefly — from the tech culture wars taking place on- and offline.
“Twenty years ago, some might have aspired more to be an engineer in the Valley, and now there’s this constant caricature of people as ‘tech bros,'” said Tom Coates, a tech veteran, on “Escape Hatch ” cocktail party. “But we’re not all gathered here tonight to watch an Ayn Rand filmography. We’re all trying to have fun.”
Mr. Goldman said part of the Silicon Valley Valley’s attraction to “Dune” may be due to characters like Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, a messianic figure who leads an oppressed tribal group in rising up and defeating their enemies. lord
“What people want, what they’re always trying to recreate, is the charismatic leader who has the ability to see the future,” Mr. Goldman said. “The hero worship of Steve Jobs is up there with the fanatical praise of Paul Atreides.”
What’s not clear is how many of Silicon Valley’s tech elite picked up the finer points of the source material. Mr. Herbert is deeply skeptical of human technological progress, a view that informs his series.
“It’s all predicated on a world where artificial intelligence has been completely wiped out,” said Cal Henderson, Slack’s co-founder and chief technical officer, who attended Thursday’s party.
(That morning, Elon Musk sued OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, for claiming that the company put commercial interests before the future of humanity. “Meta doesn’t even begin to describe it, ” said another person at the party.)
However, the attendees were determined to have fun. One showed Mr. Herrero and Mr. Goldman of a glossy, custom-printed “Dune: Part Two” poster, with the host’s faces photoshopped over the film’s celebrities. The tables are stacked 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 ran for two hours and 46 minutes, ended, the group headed to a VIP room to record a live podcast edition of what they saw. The geeking out continued past midnight.
Soon after, Mr. Goldman bought tickets to a Monday matinee of “Dune: Part Two.”
“I can’t wait to see it again,” he said.
