Paramount has approved making Dune into a movie.... again.
http://us.macmillan.com/NewsDetails.aspx?id=2175&publisher=torforge
There was the David Lynch movie (http://imdb.com/title/tt0087182/), which I loved, but you would only understand if you had read the book. Then the Sci-Fi channel mini-series (http://imdb.com/title/tt0142032/), which was also good, but had a very different feel.
And now Paramount. My only excitement for this is the hope that is leads to the following books being made into movies, though I don't think my favorite book of the series, God Emperor Dune, would make a very good movie.
Still, the book series is a great study of control of limited resources. Frank Herbert had said that he was using the Spice to represent an essential, but some what rare resource like petroleum.