Dunesday's Box Office Presales Show A Clear Winner Between Avengers: Doomsday And Dune: Part Three

December 18, 2026, is going to be a thrilling day for big-budget movie fans. Dubbed "Dunesday" ahead of time, that Friday will see the theatrical release of both Denis Villeneuve's "Dune: Part Three" and Marvel Studios' "Avengers: Doomsday." And while the name obviously evokes "Barbenheimer," i.e. the day "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" premiered at the same time to great success, Dunesday is not exactly the same. It was assumed that "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" would appeal to very different audiences, much like the lucrative box office opening matchups that had come before. There, the fun came from two very different movies becoming big hits over the same weekend.

But "Dune 3" and "Doomsday" are not a Venn diagram, they're an overlapping circle. Both movies are targeting similar demographics, and their respective franchises share quite a few actors (like Zendaya and Josh Brolin). Add in the fact that both are large-scale films competing not only for audiences but for premium formats to boot (a battle "Doomsday" lost, leading to the creation of Infinity Vision as an IMAX competitor), and it will be a very interesting weekend at the box office.

Yet, although we're still over a month away from Duneday, we already have a pretty clear idea of which movie will win that weekend. That's because we have presale ticket numbers for both films, and as box office pundit EmpireCity Box Office put it on Twitter/X, "There is no real competition between the two, shows you what a juggernaut is incoming," with the clear and undisputed winner being "Avengers: Doomsday." The account added that presales suggest "Doomsday" will win the box office frame "by a 3.2x or 4x to 1 ratio," which would be a pretty sizable gap between the two films.

Here's the thing: There was never really a competition between "Dune: Part Three" and "Avengers: Doomsday" when it came to the box office. Denis Villeneuve's latest Frank Herbert adaptation was simply never going to rake in the kind of money that an "Avengers" film could make. None of the previous "Dune" movies have crossed $1 billion at the global box office, and even in the event that "Doomsday" under-performs financially, the fact that it brings together so many beloved characters from different eras of Marvel movies (including Fox's X-Men films) virtually guarantees it will still manage to collect a huge chunk of change.

We know "Doomsday" has already set a big box office record, surpassing $50 million in presales 100 days before the film's release (the first time in history that's happened). This is not to say that "Dune 3" will perform badly, though. The movie did huge business for IMAX when tickets went on sale, so it's set to become a commercial success in its own right. But even without IMAX screens, "Doomsday" has, to put it plainly, more mainstream appeal. People of all ages know and care about the likes of Captain America, the X-Men, and so forth, but they might not be so interested in watching Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides wrestle with the knowledge that he's committed multiple genocides in "Dune: Part Three."

Again, the "Dune" threequel should be perfectly fine thanks to the heightened interest in its IMAX and other premium format screenings — something that turned "The Odyssey" into a titanic hit earlier this year. Still, there's little doubt which half of Dunesday is going to emerge triumphant on December 18, 2026.