AMC CEO Apologizes as ‘Dune: Part Three’ Presale Demand Triples Previous Records
Blockbuster ticket rollouts have become something of a spectator sport in their own right this year, with each new presale wave seemingly designed to outdo the last. Between Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ and Marvel’s ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day,’ 2026 has already delivered several moments where advance demand alone became the headline before a single frame played in theaters.
That trend reached a new peak this week when Warner Bros. and Legendary opened the widest wave yet of presales for ‘Dune: Part Three,’ covering IMAX 70mm, digital IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and the rest of the film’s premium large format tier. The response overwhelmed ticketing infrastructure almost instantly, sending fans into hour-long digital queues and flooding social media with reports of crashed apps and failed transactions.
The scale of that demand prompted AMC CEO Adam Aron to issue a public apology, revealing just how far this rollout outpaced the theater chain’s own recent record-setting launches. According to Aron, ticketing traffic across AMC’s website and mobile app reached levels approximately three times higher than what the company experienced during the ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ ticket launch, which itself had followed strong advance sales for ‘The Odyssey.’
“It’s not that our systems totally failed,” Aron wrote. “We have been selling enormous numbers of tickets today, but when any of our customers experience less than our best, it is just not right.” He acknowledged that despite internal preparation ahead of the launch, “We thought we were ready, but we weren’t,” and confirmed AMC has approved roughly $2 million in IT resources to address the ongoing ticketing issues.
Beyond the ticketing chaos itself, the sheer scale of demand has fueled growing speculation that ‘Dune: Part Three’ could become the first film in the franchise to cross the $100 million mark on opening weekend, a milestone no prior ‘Dune’ installment has come close to reaching domestically.
That kind of opening would place the film in genuinely rare company. Historically, only six other films have opened in December with a $100 million-plus domestic weekend: ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home,’ four Christmas-timed ‘Star Wars’ releases, and ‘Avatar: The Way of Water.’ Notably, ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash,’ the most recent entry in that other billion-dollar franchise, opened to $89.16 million domestically in December 2025, falling short of the $100 million threshold despite the franchise’s massive global following.
If ‘Dune: Part Three’ manages to clear that bar, it would mark a significant outperformance compared to that recent Avatar benchmark, and would represent the first time any high-end science fiction franchise has hit that mark with a Dune-scale production. Given how consistently each new presale wave for the film has broken records this year, following an earlier April sellout of its limited IMAX 70mm allotment within minutes, the trajectory increasingly points in that direction.
That potential milestone carries extra weight given what ‘Dune: Part Three’ is up against. The film shares its December 18 release date with Marvel’s ‘Avengers: Doomsday,’ setting up a head-to-head box office battle fans have nicknamed “Dunesday.” Should both films clear $100 million on the same opening weekend, it would mark an unprecedented moment in box office history, the first time two separate films have each opened above that threshold on the exact same weekend.
Much of the presale intensity also traces back to earlier momentum from ‘The Odyssey,’ which similarly overwhelmed AMC’s ticketing systems back in June before going on to become the highest-grossing IMAX release in history. That success appears to have primed audiences for another must-see cinematic event, translating directly into the kind of urgency now driving ‘Dune: Part Three’s’ ticket sales months ahead of release.
With four months still separating the film from its actual theatrical debut, plenty could shift before opening weekend numbers are finalized. Still, if current presale momentum holds, ‘Dune: Part Three’ appears positioned to deliver a genuinely historic opening for the franchise, and possibly reshape expectations for what a high-end science fiction blockbuster can achieve during the December box office corridor.
Do you think Dune: Part Three will become the first film in the franchise to open above $100 million domestically?
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