AMC CEO Adam Aron apologized publicly Tuesday night for the ticketing meltdown that hit his company when Dune: Part Three presales opened, and buried in the apology is the single most useful number anyone has attached to this movie so far.
Ticketing traffic across AMC’s website and app ran roughly three times higher than what the chain saw during the Spider-Man: Brand New Day ticket launch.
Brand New Day is the highest-grossing movie of 2026. It opened to a record $360 million domestic.
Dune 3 tripled its ticketing traffic on a day when only premium formats were even on sale.
What Aron Actually Said
Aron posted the statement to X on Tuesday.
He said the crushing volume briefly slowed or glitched AMC’s online ticketing, with the worst of it hitting premium format showings and the chain’s most in-demand locations. He was careful to say the systems did not fully fail, and that AMC sold an enormous number of tickets on the day.
Then the admission: “We thought we were ready, but we weren’t.”
Aron called the situation intolerable and inexcusable, said AMC needs roughly $2 million in IT programming resource to fix it properly, and confirmed the money has already been approved.
He told fans who got shut out to try again, because inventory remains at many locations and showtimes.
This is the third time AMC has been here. The Odyssey broke it. Avengers: Doomsday strained it. Dune 3 finished the job.
Why The 3x Number Matters
Until Tuesday, everything anyone had on Dune: Part Three demand was soft. Sellout reports. Sourced trade chatter about dozens of IMAX 70mm showings gone.
No studio has released a dollar figure, and both Warner Bros. and Disney declined to comment when TheWrap asked last weekend.
Aron’s statement is the first hard comparison from anyone with actual transaction data in front of them.
Read the comparison carefully, because it cuts deeper than it looks. Brand New Day went on sale with the entire marketplace in front of it. Every format except IMAX. Every screen. Wide release inventory, all of it live.
Dune 3 tripled that traffic while selling IMAX 70mm, digital IMAX, Dolby and a handful of early Insider screenings.
General admission tickets for standard screens are not on sale yet. That wave is still coming.
Three times the traffic on a fraction of the inventory is not a rounding error. It is a signal.
That benchmark matters because Brand New Day is the highest-grossing movie of 2026, having become the fastest film ever to $800 million domestic.
The $100 Million Argument
Box office watchers on social media moved fast on it.
Analyst Luiz Fernando, posting on X, wrote that he expected a big first day for Dune 3 presales and still got blindsided by what happened, and floated the possibility of a $100 million-plus domestic opening.
A $100 million domestic opening would be a first for the Dune franchise by a wide margin. Dune opened to $41 million in 2021 on a day-and-date HBO Max release. Dune: Part Two opened to $82.5 million in 2024. Neither has come close to the number being floated.
It would also be rare air for December.
Only six movies have ever opened to $100 million or more in the month: Spider-Man: No Way Home, the four Star Wars Christmas releases, and Avatar: The Way of Water. Dune 3 would be the seventh.
And it would clear Avatar: Fire and Ash, which opened to $89 million last December as the third film in a franchise with no competition on the board.
What This Does To The Doomsday Math
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for the people pushing a $400 million Avengers: Doomsday opening.
As we broke down earlier, the $400 million projection has a screen capacity problem.
Brand New Day hit $360 million with virtually the entire marketplace to itself. Doomsday has to beat that number while sharing premium screens and regular screens with Dune 3, and while ceding IMAX entirely.
The $400 million case only holds if Dune 3 is a polite second feature that takes a slice of premium and gets out of the way.
Aron’s number says it is not going to be a polite second feature.
Every dollar Dune 3 pulls on December 18 comes out of the same December 18 marketplace, off screens that would otherwise be running Doomsday.
If Dune 3 is genuinely a $100 million opener, that is not competition at the margins. That is a second headliner splitting the biggest weekend of the year, and the screen grid has to absorb both.
Warner Bros. also gets to start counting before Marvel does.
Dune 3 has paid Insider screenings on December 14, 15 and 17 in the highest-priced formats in the market, on screens Marvel cannot book, because Warner Bros. locked IMAX into a three-week exclusive window.
The Caveats Worth Keeping
Traffic is not tickets. Aron gave a website and app traffic multiple, not a sales multiple, and a chunk of that traffic was people refreshing a broken checkout over and over. Frustration inflates the number.
Scarcity inflates it too. IMAX 70mm sits on roughly 36 screens worldwide running about one show a day. That configuration produces a stampede for any event movie, and it produced one here.
None of that erases the comparison. AMC ran the same kind of premium-heavy on-sale for The Odyssey and for Doomsday and did not post a number like this either time. The company just approved $2 million because of what Dune 3 did to it.
Tickets are on sale now in IMAX 70mm, digital IMAX and premium large formats, with a new spot released alongside the launch. General admission tickets open closer to release.
Follow every update at our Dune: Part Three hub.
Dune: Part Three opens only in theaters and IMAX across North America on December 18, 2026, and internationally beginning December 16, 2026. Avengers: Doomsday opens the same day.
