Avengers: Doomsday has passed $35 million in presales, and the movie is still four months from theaters.
Box office tracker Global Box Office posted the milestone Wednesday, noting that no film in the history of cinema has reached that figure this far ahead of release.
Doomsday opens December 18. For comparison, Spider-Man: Brand New Day did not start selling tickets until 45 days before release, and it opened to a record $360 million.
How It Got To $35 Million
Tickets first went on sale July 20 alongside the first trailer, and only for premium formats. No IMAX, roughly 1,000 domestic locations.
Variety reported the first 24 hours alone pulled in $16.5 million, with premium showtimes for December 17 and 18 largely selling out on day one.
The wide wave for all theaters opened this past weekend at D23.
Earlier this week, World of Reel, citing Box Office Theory, put the running total around $22 million. TheWrap reported the first two days of wide sales ran about 65% ahead of Brand New Day‘s first two days.
Now the number is $35 million and counting. That is roughly $13 million added in just the past few days since the wide launch.
The Record Comes With A Calendar Asterisk
No blockbuster has ever put tickets on sale this early, which is exactly why no movie has ever banked $35 million this early. There was never four months of runway to fill.
Presales are also front-loaded by design. They spike the day tickets go live, cool off, and surge again in the final week before release.
That is one reason the $400 million opening extrapolations have a screen capacity problem, as we broke down this week.
TheWrap made a similar point in its own reporting: nothing has ever gone on sale this far out, so the comparisons are very inexact.
None of that makes $35 million a small number. Avengers: Endgame is estimated to have done $120 million to $140 million in total presales, among the highest ever recorded, and its tickets were only on sale for under a month.
Doomsday is at $35 million with 17 weeks left to stack.
Dune 3 Is Selling Tickets Too
The December 18 date is shared with Dune: Part Three, and Warner Bros. is posting demand signals of its own.
Dune 3‘s premium on-sale Tuesday hit AMC with roughly triple the ticketing traffic of the Brand New Day launch, per CEO Adam Aron. That was with only IMAX 70mm, digital IMAX, and premium large formats even live.
Dune 3‘s wide presales for standard screens have not started yet. That wave is still coming.
Doomsday also spends the holidays without IMAX, since Warner Bros. locked the format into a three-week exclusive window for Dune 3.
Disney’s answer, the Infinity Vision certification for Dolby, XD, and RPX screens, is a label, not exclusivity. Dune 3 plays on those same screens.
What The Number Actually Tells Us
The demand for Doomsday is real, and it is enormous. Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, the returning X-Men, and the first Avengers movie in seven years have people buying December tickets in August.
Whether that converts into the biggest opening weekend of all time is a different question.
Brand New Day set its $360 million record with virtually the entire marketplace to itself. Doomsday will be splitting premium and regular screens with a Dune 3 that is crashing ticketing servers on partial inventory.
The presale race is a blowout so far. The screen math on December 18 is the same problem it was last week.
Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026, the same day as Dune: Part Three. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the current opening weekend record holder, has passed $2 billion worldwide.
