"Asimov's Vision". The guy himself has said in interviews that it was entirely inspired by gas/fluid dynamics theory, where you could predict the motion of the whole but individual molecules would be random, and then "what if that could be applied to people". Everything else is just exploring and extrapolating. It's far from perfect but I feel that if it was a new IP work the reaction to it would be very different. A…
Having read both, I don’t think Dune is impossible to bring to the screen. I think it needs to be a TV show because as a film it will need to be super long (and will be exposition heavy and/or kinda boring.) But Foundation is like the Silmarillion. It’s supposed to be detailed over centuries/millennia and definitely is hard or impossible to get right on the screen.
Well, the last books of the original series of Dune take place over thousands of years when Leto II becomes the worm via symbiosis with the sandtrout. There is so much that happens in these millenia, sometimes told in flashback through the everlasting Duncan Idaho, or through the narrative of the religious texts.
The wars and the scheming and the plans and the plots... I mean just the sisterhood's rise and attempts to undermine leto could be its own series. Heck there are more subplots in Dune than fables in the Silmarillion. In fact, I think that the flaw with the Silmarillion is that everything becomes so much of the same after a while that I stopped caring about all of the one-off stories: it got repetitive and, frankly, boring.
Dune did suffer a Jon Galt moment with all of the exposition in God Emperor of Dune, but there was a lot of storytelling in those meetings between the Duncans and Leto.