AMC CEO Apologizes as ‘Dune: Part Three’ Presale Demand Surges to New Heights

This year has turned blockbuster ticket rollouts into a spectacle, with each new presale wave aiming to surpass the last. From Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ to Marvel’s ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day,’ 2026 has already seen several instances where advance demand became the headline before any film hit theaters.

This trend reached a new high this week when Warner Bros. and Legendary launched the broadest presale wave for ‘Dune: Part Three,’ encompassing IMAX 70mm, digital IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and other premium formats. The overwhelming response quickly overwhelmed ticketing systems, leading fans into lengthy digital queues and flooding social media with reports of app crashes and failed transactions.

The magnitude of this demand prompted AMC CEO Adam Aron to publicly apologize, highlighting how this rollout surpassed the theater chain’s previous record-setting launches. Aron noted that ticketing traffic on AMC’s website and mobile app reached levels about three times higher than during the ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ ticket launch, which had already followed strong advance sales for ‘The Odyssey.’

“It’s not that our systems totally failed,” Aron explained. “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 admitted that despite preparations ahead of the launch, “We thought we were ready, but we weren’t,” and confirmed that AMC has allocated around $2 million in IT resources to resolve ongoing ticketing issues.

In addition to the ticketing chaos, the sheer demand has sparked speculation that ‘Dune: Part Three’ could be the first film in the franchise to surpass the $100 million mark on its opening weekend, a feat no previous ‘Dune’ installment has achieved domestically.

Such an opening would place the film among a select group. Historically, only six films have opened in December with a domestic weekend gross exceeding $100 million: ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home,’ four Christmas-themed ‘Star Wars’ releases, and ‘Avatar: The Way of Water.’ Notably, ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash,’ the latest entry in that billion-dollar franchise, opened to $89.16 million domestically in December 2025, falling short of the $100 million mark despite the franchise’s massive global following.

If ‘Dune: Part Three’ manages to achieve this milestone, it would represent a significant outperformance compared to the recent ‘Avatar’ benchmark and mark the first time any high-end science fiction franchise has reached that level with a production of this scale. Given the record-breaking presale waves for the film this year, including an earlier sellout of its limited IMAX 70mm allotment within minutes, the trajectory increasingly suggests this possibility.

This potential milestone is particularly noteworthy as ‘Dune: Part Three’ shares its December 18 release date with Marvel’s ‘Avengers: Doomsday,’ setting the stage for a box office showdown that fans have dubbed “Dunesday.” If both films exceed $100 million on the same opening weekend, it would mark an unprecedented moment in box office history, as it would be the first time two separate films have opened above that threshold on the same weekend.

Much of the presale excitement can also be traced back to the earlier momentum from ‘The Odyssey,’ which similarly overwhelmed AMC’s ticketing systems back in June before becoming the highest-grossing IMAX release in history. This success seems to have primed audiences for another must-see cinematic event, directly translating into the urgency now driving ‘Dune: Part Three’s’ ticket sales months ahead of its release.

With four months still to go before the film’s theatrical debut, much could change before the final opening weekend numbers are confirmed. However, if the current presale momentum continues, ‘Dune: Part Three’ seems poised to deliver a truly historic opening for the franchise, potentially reshaping expectations for what a high-end science fiction blockbuster can achieve in the December box office landscape.

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