'Avengers: Doomsday' Is Reportedly Set to Dominate 'Dune: Part Three' on 'Dunesday' Weekend

Two of the biggest films of the year open on the same day, and the early ticket sales are already telling two different stories. On raw presale volume, Avengers: Doomsday is running away with it — one tracker now puts it 3.2 to 4 times ahead of Dune: Part Three for the December 18 weekend. But on the giant screens where Dune lives, the other film just broke a record. So is Dunesday a walkover, or a split decision? The honest answer, from the numbers reported so far, is that both things are true at once.

Quick facts first

The 3.2 to 4 times claim — what it is, and what it is not

The number at the centre of this story comes from one place: a post on October 24, 2026 by the tracker EmpireCity Box Office. Quoted by ComicBasics and Fiction Horizon, it reads: "Based on presales so far, Avengers Doomsday going to win Dec. 18th weekend by a 3.2x or 4x to 1 ratio. Not a knock on the sales of Dune at all, but the winner of the weekend is set. There is no real competition between the two, shows you what a juggernaut is incoming."

Three things matter about that post. First, it is a projection based on early presale data, not a studio announcement and not a box office result — the films do not open for nearly two months. Second, the tracker itself says the gap is not a knock on Dune's sales, which are strong on their own terms (more on that below). Third, a ratio is not a total: if Dune opens above $100 million, as trackers suggest it could, then a 3.2 to 4 times gap still puts Doomsday in the $320 million to $400 million range for the weekend, which sits above even the high end of the $260 million to $300 million domestic opening projection from Global Box Office. In other words, the ratio and the opening projections do not line up neatly, and at least one of them will move before December 18. Treat the ratio as an early signal of the gap, not as a score that is already settled.

Why Doomsday's presales look so huge

Doomsday's numbers, as reported across the week, are genuinely unusual — but they come with a head start that explains part of them. The film earned $16.5 million in its first 24 hours of premium-format presales, and became the first film to pass $40 million in domestic presales a full 100 days before release, according to ComicBasics and Fiction Horizon. Trackers have since reported more than $100 million in global presales, with a more recent report putting the figure at $125 million. Disney executive Hugh Johnston said last month that Doomsday had already passed $50 million in presales three months before release, per Fiction Horizon's overseas report, and more than 70% of advance tickets sold so far were for premium Infinity Vision screenings.

The overseas picture points the same way. In Brazil and the United Kingdom, Doomsday became the fastest film ever to pass $1 million in pre-release ticket sales, ComicBasics reports. A Bulgarian tracker reported Doomsday matching Spider-Man: Brand New Day at the same point in its countdown, while leaving Dune: Part Three behind, and betting-market traders have bet against Dune outgrossing Marvel's film on opening weekend. Neither a single-country tracker nor a betting market is a box office result, but both point to the same early gap.

The head start matters, and the reports say so themselves. Doomsday's general advance sales opened roughly four months before release, while Spider-Man: Brand New Day began selling tickets only about 45 days out. After two days, TheWrap reported Doomsday running about 65% ahead of Brand New Day's pace. That comparison cuts both ways: Brand New Day set a very high bar, breaking the opening-day record with $168 million and an opening weekend of about $360 million, edging past Avengers: Endgame's $357.1 million, and it has since passed $2 billion worldwide. Doomsday beating its early pace is a real sign of demand — and also a sign of how much longer Doomsday has had to sell tickets.

Why Dune is not losing — it is winning a different race

Now the other half of the story, which the "lopsided matchup" headline can hide. Dune: Part Three has reportedly earned $10 million in early advance ticket sales, putting it on pace for a franchise-record opening of more than $100 million, Fiction Horizon reports, with Global Box Office saying a debut north of $120 million is not out of reach. Regular showings are selling better than Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the same report says. For a prestige sci-fi finale, those are not the numbers of a film in trouble.

Where Dune is outright winning is IMAX. London's BFI IMAX — the largest screen in the UK — sold 33,000 advance tickets for Dune: Part Three in just 24 hours, setting a first-day presale record for the venue with a gross of more than £880,000 (about $1.2 million), according to Collider, Bleeding Cool and Softonic. That beat the previous record of £750,000 (about $1 million) held by The Odyssey. Both films, in a neat twist, star Robert Pattinson.

The scramble around those tickets tells its own story. General presales opened worldwide on October 20, and thousands of UK fans joined virtual queues that morning — one estimate put more than 76,000 people still waiting 20 minutes after sales began, ComicBasics reports. Cineworld and Odeon had already added extra IMAX and premium large-format screenings for December 15 after early tickets proved more popular than expected, and Vue has since added more premium screenings to keep up with demand. The IMAX 70mm release is limited to just three UK cinemas — BFI IMAX, the Ronson Theatre at the Science Museum, and Vue Manchester Printworks — with previews beginning December 15 and revivals of Dune and Dune: Part Two returning from December 11. In the US, AMC's app reportedly buckled under the load, and resale listings have appeared at eye-watering prices, including a reported $1,000 listing for a single Dallas Cinemark ticket on eBay and IMAX 70mm seats listed at $200 each. Those are listings, not confirmed sales, and with only a few dozen 70mm auditoriums in the US running one show a day, almost any event film would sell out — but the queue numbers show demand well beyond the 70mm rooms.

The format split that shapes the whole weekend

Here is the structural fact that explains why both films can be "winning" at once. Dune: Part Three secured an exclusive three-week IMAX window in the US, meaning Doomsday cannot screen in that format during its opening stretch. Doomsday will not be released in IMAX at all, Softonic notes, leaving the biggest theatres exclusively to Arrakis. To compensate, Disney introduced its Infinity Vision certification for premium screens — which is why more than 70% of Doomsday's advance tickets are for Infinity Vision shows.

That split is also why the raw presale comparison flatters Doomsday. Marvel's film is playing across all formats and showtimes, which gives it a far broader reach, while Dune's presale story is concentrated in premium and IMAX shows, where each ticket costs more but each screen holds fewer shows. One analysis quoted by Fiction Horizon put it plainly: Doomsday holds the edge in raw presale volume, while Dune dominates high-margin IMAX 70mm ticketing. Softonic reaches the same conclusion from the other side — there may not be a single winner at all, with one film taking regular theatres and the other taking IMAX, in the same way Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey split the summer. Theatres, meanwhile, have grown nervous about the two films eating into each other's audiences, Fiction Horizon notes, even as many analysts expect Dunesday to set a new domestic weekend record if both films hold their pace.

What each film actually is

Avengers: Doomsday, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, brings Robert Downey Jr. back to Marvel as Doctor Doom, at the centre of a multiverse story that has been marketed for months, including a new preview shown during the World Series. Dune: Part Three, directed by Denis Villeneuve, closes his trilogy: set nearly two decades after Dune: Part Two, it follows Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) facing the consequences of his reign, with old allies returning, new threats emerging, and Chani (Zendaya) back at the heart of the story. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Lady Jessica, Anya Taylor-Joy is cast as Paul's sister Alia, and Robert Pattinson, Florence Pugh, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem co-star, per Collider. Dune: Part Two earned well over $700 million worldwide, and some observers believe the finale could become a $1 billion hit — that is a hope, not a reported figure, and it will depend on how far the film travels beyond its IMAX base.

The Barbenheimer comparison has followed this clash since the dates were set, and it is worth one careful note. In 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer both thrived after opening on the same day, because they pulled different audiences into theatres on the same weekend. Dunesday could do the same — a Marvel crowd and a Villeneuve crowd are not the same crowd, and a six-hour double bill is exactly what many fans are already planning. But Barbenheimer also had no format war at its centre: neither film locked the other out of IMAX for three weeks. That is the part of Dunesday with no clean precedent, and it is the part that will decide whether the weekend is a shared record or a one-sided win.

Good to know: release dates and the clash

Both films open in US theatres on December 18, 2026. Dune: Part Three opens internationally starting December 16, 2026, per the reports used here. Dune's IMAX 70mm previews begin December 15 in the UK, with the wider IMAX release on December 18. No India-specific presale figure was confirmed in the reports used for this article, so this piece does not invent one — check local listings closer to opening week for India showtimes and premium-format availability, since the IMAX split will shape which film gets the biggest screens in each city. Our earlier articles on this site cover Dune: Part Three's IMAX presale record and Avengers: Doomsday's cast and preview in full.

My take

Call the weekend now and you will probably be right about Doomsday winning it — the presale gap is too wide, and too consistent across countries, to be a blip. But calling it a rout misses the point. Dune was never built to out-sell a Marvel crossover on raw tickets; it was built to own the biggest screens in the world for three weeks, and on that measure it is already doing it, with a venue record and queues to prove it. The smartest read of Dunesday is not "Marvel wins, Dune loses." It is that December 18 will be two opening weekends happening in the same multiplex — one in every screen, one on the biggest screen — and the film that walks away happiest may not be the one with the bigger number, but the one that got the audience it was made for.