INDIA – AUGUST 08: Queue of advance ticket for watching movie. (Photo by A Prabhakar Rao/The The India Today Group via Getty Images)
The India Today Group via Getty Images
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 $50 million weekends for the first time in company history, that is not simply a great film finding its audience. It is the market signaling, with real dollars, exactly which kinds of releases it still considers must-see. Dune: Part Three makes the point even more starkly, because it is doing this three separate times before it has even opened, and because it is walking directly into a collision with Avengers: Doomsday on the same December weekend, a matchup fans have already nicknamed “Dunesday.” Warner Bros. is not simply confident the film will find an audience. It is treating the presale window itself as a battlefield, staggering IMAX, Dolby, and early Insider screenings across separate release events, each engineered to generate its own wave of urgency, sellouts, and press coverage before the movie has played a single wide-release show. Nobody is refreshing a browser at 9 a.m. for a mid-budget adult drama. They are doing it for a small number of releases per year built specifically to survive in a marketplace that has stopped rewarding anything less than an event.
The counterargument, and it is a fair one, is that mid-budget films have shown real signs of life in 2026. Amazon MGM’s $200 million bet on the original science fiction film Project Hail Mary earned strong reviews and a strong CinemaScore. Universal’s Reminders of Him held well on the strength of word of mouth. These complicate a simple death-of-the-middle narrative.
But look closely at how those films succeeded, and the two-tier thesis holds rather than breaks. Every one of them worked by borrowing the logic of the event film: a theatrical window long enough for word of mouth to build, a marketing campaign built around giving audiences a specific reason to leave the house rather than wait three weeks for a streaming release, and, in Amazon’s case, a budget large enough to compete for a premium format screen. The mid-budget films succeeding right now are not proving the old middle-of-the-market model still works. They are proving that the only way to survive as a mid-budget film in 2026 is to behave like a small-scale event film. The floor has risen. What used to be a reliable, modest theatrical run is now a bet that has to justify itself with the same urgency IMAX uses to sell a $52 million opening weekend.
For an industry watching this unfold, the lesson is not that scarcity marketing is a clever new tactic worth imitating everywhere. It’s a signal about where genuine audience demand still lives, and a warning about how thin that layer has become. Every dollar IMAX and Dolby pull in from a handful of marquee releases is also a dollar reminder that the other 95 percent of a given year’s theatrical slate is fighting for attention in an environment where “worth leaving the house for” has become the baseline test for survival, not a bonus feature.
There’s a version of this story where premium format growth is treated as an unambiguous good, a sign that people still love the communal experience of a big screen. That’s true as far as it goes. But an industry that can only reliably fill seats for a dozen event-scale releases a year, while quietly ceding everything else to streaming, is not a healthy industry putting on a growth spurt. It’s an industry that has figured out how to make its remaining bets bigger because it has stopped knowing how to make smaller ones work.
The crashed servers and sold-out sections for Dune: Part Three, the year-long presale windows for The Odyssey, the record IMAX quarters, all of it looks like good news on an earnings call. It is good news, for the small number of films built to clear an increasingly high bar. What it obscures is a market that has narrowed underneath the headline numbers, and an audience being trained to treat “going to the movies” as an occasional, expensive, plan-ahead event rather than a habit. That shift may be great for IMAX shareholders. It is a much more complicated story for the health of American film.
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