Dune: Part Three won't move off Avengers: Doomsday's date — and Doomsday's presales just got scarier
Two studios have spent a year refusing to blink over December 18. The new presale numbers suggest only one of them still has a reason to.
Warner Bros. dated Dune: Part Three for December 18, 2026, first, and when Marvel pushed Avengers: Doomsday from May onto the exact same Friday, Warner refused to move. The studio's armor was real: Denis Villeneuve shot the finale largely with IMAX cameras, and Dune locked every IMAX screen in the country for three straight weeks. Marvel's answer was to invent a premium format of its own, certifying select auditoriums as "Infinity Vision."
The internet named the standoff Dunesday and waited for a second Barbenheimer. Then Doomsday's tickets went on sale, and the fight stopped looking like a fight.
What the presales are doing
Doomsday has been breaking the presale tracker all autumn, and each checkpoint lands harder than the last:
- July: the premium-format launch on 1,000 screens sells $16.5 million in 24 hours, about double Deadpool & Wolverine's first day.
- August: general sales open four months out, and TheWrap's sources put the first two days 65 percent ahead of Brand New Day's first two days.
- October 6: worldwide presales cross $100 million, with domestic past $55 million.
- Late October: the tracker TheFlatLannister posts on the Box Office Theory forum that 54 days out, Doomsday's sales sit at the level Brand New Day reached six days before release — the update that set off r/boxoffice.
The movie Brand New Day in question opened to $360.1 million domestic and $927 million worldwide, the two biggest openings ever recorded. Doomsday is pacing ahead of that film without having released its final trailer.
"T-6??? Holy shit and the final trailer hasn't been released yet."
— a commenter on r/boxoffice
The forum's bulls are already past the record and arguing about the ceiling:
"400M looks everyday more and more guaranteed. I have a very bullish prediction — Doomsday if great can do 3.5-4x legs from that 400M+ OW which will lead not only to the first 1B domestic, but a chance for first 1.5B."
— a commenter on r/boxoffice
Why Barbenheimer doesn't map onto this
Barbie and Oppenheimer worked as a double feature because they shared no audience and no screens. Dunesday is the opposite case: two four-quadrant sci-fi tentpoles selling the same premium seats to a lot of the same people, on a weekend where one of them is tracking toward a $260–300 million domestic start and the other hasn't opened sales.
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For context on what Dune brings to the collision: Part Two opened to $82.5 million domestic in March 2024 and finished at $714 million worldwide — a terrific result that is also roughly what Doomsday's opening weekend alone is projected to clear. The three-week IMAX lock remains Warner's one structural advantage, and it matters, since Part Two earned about a fifth of its domestic money on premium formats.
Doomsday's projected opening weekend is in the neighborhood of Dune: Part Two's entire domestic run.
The question Warner has to answer before December is whether the IMAX moat is worth the collision, because holiday corridors reward legs, and legs go to the movie that wins opening weekend's conversation. Villeneuve's finale will have the best screens in the country for three weeks. Marvel appears on track to have everything else.
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