RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Hollywood & Entertainment ‘Dune: Part Three’ Is Selling Out Screenings Four Months Early, But Is That A Good Thing? By Olivia Shalhoup ,
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Olivia Shalhoup covers entertainment marketing and social strategy. Follow Author Aug 18, 2026, 06:57pm EDT --:-- / --:-- This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . Summary Dune: Part Three's chaotic presales, marked by server crashes and rapid sell-outs for premium formats like IMAX, underscore a significant shift in the film industry. This phenomenon, also seen with *The Odyssey*, reveals that a select few tentpole films are becoming "events," driving record box office for premium screens. However, this success for blockbusters obscures a deeper issue: the collapse of mid-budget films. The industry increasingly concentrates its gains into a narrow band of spectacle-driven releases, while other films struggle to find an audience. Moviegoing is transforming into an occasional, expensive, plan-ahead event rather than a regular habit, raising concerns for the long-term health of American cinema.
Warner Bros. opened a new wave of presales for Dune: Part Three , covering IMAX, Dolby, and a run of early "Insider" screenings four days ahead of the film's December 18 wide release. It was not a smooth process. Theater websites crashed. Fans reported waiting in digital queues for tickets the way people once waited in line outside a box office, refreshing browser tabs instead of standing on a sidewalk, but functionally doing the same thing: showing up early and staying put because they did not trust the ticket to still be there later. It was the third round of presales for the film this year. The first, back in April, sold out its entire allotment of IMAX 70mm screenings, available in just eleven U.S. cities, within minutes.
Dune: Part Three does not open for another four months. It is already behaving like a sold-out concert tour.
That is not an isolated case. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey put IMAX 70mm tickets on sale roughly a year before the film opened this past summer. What made that notable is that the tickets sold out, presales kept climbing for weeks, and by early August the film had become the highest-grossing IMAX release in history, surpassing even Avatar . IMAX is on pace to close 2026 with a record $1.4 billion in global box office, on top of a record $1.28 billion in 2025. Dolby Cinema just posted its biggest opening weekend ever, off the back of Spider-Man: Brand New Day . Premium large format screens accounted for roughly a quarter of that film's domestic opening alone. Dune: Part Three is simply the clearest version yet of a pattern that has been building all year: a small number of films for which the ticket itself, months before release, has become the event.
The trade press has settled on a tidy narrative: theatrical is back, and premium formats are dragging it back to life. There is truth in that. But the more interesting story is the one hiding underneath the box office headlines. IMAX represents about 1 percent of domestic movie screens and captured more than 5 percent of the domestic box office in 2025. That gap is not evidence of a healthy industry spreading its gains evenly. It is evidence of an industry concentrating its gains into an increasingly narrow band of releases, while everything outside that band quietly disappears from theaters altogether.
Ticket scarcity for tentpole films is not proof that moviegoing has recovered. It is a symptom of what happens when an industry stops making anything in between.
For most of the studio era, a film's theatrical viability lived on a spectrum. A $20 million character drama, a $45 million adult thriller, a $60 million comedy with two recognizable stars, these were not glamorous bets, but they were reliable ones. They filled multiplexes on ordinary weekends, gave mid-career directors a place to work, and gave audiences a reason to go to the movies that had nothing to do with spectacle. That middle tier has been collapsing for years, and 2026 is the year the collapse became impossible to ignore, precisely because the top tier is having its best year in company history.
The economics explain why. Industry analysts still cite something close to a 2.5x rule of thumb: a film generally needs to earn well over twice its production budget just to clear marketing and theater revenue shares before it turns a profit. That math punishes the middle disproportionately. A $200 million tentpole can absorb a soft opening weekend because merchandising, international grosses, and format premiums cushion the fall. A $10 million horror film can turn a profit on a modest opening because its downside is small. A $45 million drama has neither cushion. It needs a real audience to show up in week one, and increasingly, that audience has other things to do.
Streaming didn’t just give people an alternative to the multiplex, it gave them an alternative to the specific kind of film that used to fill the multiplex on a Tuesday night. Home video used to be the safety net for a movie that underperformed theatrically. That safety net is largely gone.
What's left, then, is a two-tier system. At the top: films built from the ground up as events, frequently shot on IMAX cameras, marketed with a year of lead time, priced at a premium, and treated by audiences the way they treat a stadium tour, as something to plan around, not something to catch if you happen to be free. At the bottom: everything else, increasingly routed to streaming, day-and-date releases, or thin theatrical windows that function more as marketing for a later streaming debut than as a genuine box office play. There is very little left occupying the middle distance.
This is where the scarcity behavior becomes legible as data rather than vibes. When The Odyssey books presales a year out and IMAX reports back-to-back...
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