I thought Avengers: Doomsday would bury Dune: Part Three. The presales say I was wrong
Two films open December 18. One will sell a third as many tickets as the other — and still walk away with a record and my apology.
When Marvel parked Avengers: Doomsday on December 18, directly on top of Dune: Part Three, I assumed the spice had been harvested. Warner Bros. refused to move — "we chose the date first" — which read as pride with a release calendar. An Avengers event movie swallows every premium screen and every casual moviegoer in sight; the sane play is to flee to January.
The presales are in, and the flight would have been the mistake. Dune: Part Three sold about $10 million domestically on its first day of wide presales, the best opening-day presale in the franchise — better than Part Two, which went on to an $82.5 million debut. Box Office Theory's tracking now has it pointed at $100 million-plus for the weekend. Against it, Doomsday is tracking at $260–300 million domestic with some forecasts reaching $400 million, outselling Dune three-to-one or more.
Both numbers can be true because they're measuring different audiences, and that's the part I got wrong. The overlap between "camping the AMC app for Infinity Vision screens" and "booking an IMAX 70mm sci-fi finale" is thinner than the calendar suggested.
The record inside the defeat
Losing the weekend still pays. Since 2015, the biggest opening weekend for a film that didn't finish No. 1 has belonged to Inside Out: $90.4 million, earned in the shadow of Jurassic World's second weekend. A $100 million Dune opening takes that record — the biggest silver medal in box-office history, set against the biggest superhero launch since Endgame.
Inside Out held the runner-up record for a decade with $90.4 million. Dune: Part Three is tracking past it — against an Avengers movie.
Villeneuve's refusal to blink now looks like the shrewdest scheduling call of the year. "Dunesday" hands his finale the one thing a December sci-fi epic can't buy: a date when the entire moviegoing world shows up at once, with his film positioned as the adult alternative two theaters down. Losing the weekend to Doomsday was always guaranteed. Losing it while setting a record is the version where everybody wins, and the industry gets its biggest single weekend ever.
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The r/boxoffice thread remembered how this franchise's story was supposed to go:
"and 5 years ago people predicted Dune to have similar run to Blade Runner 2049 with all the sequels plan cancelled"
That was the smart-money take in 2021: a gorgeous Villeneuve sci-fi that critics love and audiences skip, sequels dying on the vine. Instead the trilogy closes with presale records and a shot at nine figures in a weekend it isn't even winning. I called this matchup a burial. It's a coronation with two thrones.
Previously we wrote: Why did Snow turn evil in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes? Tom Blyth says it happened in three stages