Dune: Part Three won't hit a billion — blame the book Villeneuve chose to film
Everyone's blaming Avengers: Doomsday for Dune: Part Three's billion-dollar problem. The real culprit was published in 1969.
A new r/boxoffice thread on 15 October opened with a confident call: "I can see Dune 3 comfortably clearing $1 billion." The replies talked it down to between $700 million and $850 million, and the top comment allowed only that a billion "definitely isn't impossible", the box office version of a polite cough. The sharpest sceptic skipped the maths:
"I don't see it making considerably more than Part Two. It probably won't be a crowd pleaser."
— r/boxoffice commenter
That second sentence is the whole story. The rest of the thread was busy arguing about IMAX screens.
The calendar is the smaller problem
The easy villain is the date. Dune: Part Three opens on 18 December 2026, the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, which passed $50 million in US presales in September with three months to go. Marvel will win the weekend.
But Warner Bros. holds the better screens. Part Three is the first Dune shot on IMAX film cameras, it reportedly has US IMAX screens to itself for three weeks, and its opening-weekend 70mm shows in North America and London sold out in April. The growth curve looks healthy too:
- Dune (2021): $410 million worldwide, while streaming on HBO Max on the same day.
- Dune: Part Two (2024): $714 million, with cinemas to itself.
- A billion for Part Three: another $286 million on top, or about 40% more.
Another commenter asked: "You think the third movie in a series is going to have a near 50%+ BO increase EASILY?" Fair question. The answer depends on what's being sold.
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Dune Messiah is the problem
Part Three adapts Dune Messiah, the 1969 sequel Frank Herbert wrote to take the hero away from his readers. Part Two ended on a coronation: Paul wins the duel, the throne and a holy war. Messiah is the bit afterwards, where that victory turns into a catastrophe and Paul knows exactly how it happened. Timothée Chalamet explained it at the July IMAX fan event:
"I read somewhere that it's why he wrote 'Messiah' as a follow-up [because] people mistook Paul as a classic hero. And he wanted to warn the world what can happen when people blindly follow leaders, and that even the good can be corrupted."
— Timothée Chalamet, at the Dune: Part Three IMAX fan event
The CinemaCon footage in April didn't soften it. Jason Momoa's Duncan Idaho tells Paul: "You have conquered the galaxy. You have destroyed thousands of worlds. I think you are way beyond redemption." Chalamet says Paul has become "his worst vision."
Part Two sold the coronation. Part Three has to sell the bill.
Billion-dollar films send people home happy enough to drag their mates back the next weekend. Part Two did that with sandworm rides and a throne room. Messiah is about the cost of all that cheering.
Villeneuve's insurance policy
To be fair, Denis Villeneuve has seen this coming. He calls Part Three "a more action-packed and more tense film, more muscular than the two others" and insists that "at the heart, it's still a love story" between Paul and Chani. Chalamet says this is the film where Villeneuve "took the most creative liberty." That's a director padding a bleak book with action and romance, and it might be worth an extra $50 million.
It won't turn a tragedy into a victory lap. My money is on something close to Part Two's $714 million: a perfectly good number, and the first time this series hasn't jumped. Herbert wrote Messiah to stop readers cheering for Paul. In December, it may work on ticket buyers too.
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