Why Dune Part Two WON'T Hold Like Oppenheimer

Good evening / morning to everyone out there!

I feel it's important to clarify why I am not predicting that Dune Part Two will land near the billion or even $900m mark. Rather, I believe the movie will hit around $720m - $800m for its total box office haul. The reason is that Dune Part Two seems to have a particular niche audience demand of premium showings. Dune Part Two without premium screens is like Avatar in 2D. 

With Ghostbusters and Kong v Godzilla both coming out soon and stripping away those premium screens, Dune 2 is more susceptible than most movies to losing its hold. The film currently has a $190m projected global debut. Even with China still not reporting, it's tough to imagine that Dune 2 is going to pull a better-than 4x hold. 

To illustrate this point, check out the seat reservations from this weekend provided to us by John M. Premium screens for D2 were filled to nearly capacity all across North America. But regular theaters were vacant. That's uncommon for movies except when we're looking at visual experience films. The problem with Visual Experiences is that they need premium screen capture for a long period of time -- Avatar does so stinking well because it releases near Christmas and then gets January without any competition for those screens.

Here's the message from John M:

Most of the standard format showings are largely empty. Typically ZERO to three seats sold. This multiplex has 7 standard screens showing Dune that are largely empty. (When I saw Dune Part 1 there were three of us in the theater).

There are fifteen standard format screenings and three premium screenings today.

The alternative in our area is an AMC multiplex with no premium theatres. They have 14 showings of Dune today and few seats are sold.

This raises issues:

1. Few people apparently want to see Dune 2 in standard format. The normies are not showing up. Note the over-the-top reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and how the "verified" score is higher than the all audience scores and the number of one line "It's a masterpiece" reviews (suggesting paid shills).

2. There are limited premium screens with limited showings due to the length of the film

3. Around here at least, Dune 2 starts surrendering the premium screens to Kung Fu Panda next weekend and then to Ghostbusters.

4. The percentage of people who will see a Part 2 without seeing the Part 1 is likely small.

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So do I want to be a wet blanket for Dune 2? No. I'd be ecstatic to see it break a billion. But the most likely film to do that is Kong v Godzilla. And then we have to wait all the way until July to get another really good crack at it with Despicable Me 4. For theaters to survive and thrive into 2025, we're going to need more billion-dollar blockbusters than I'm anticipating at the moment. And that's a shame.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Your pal,
Pro