Dune: Part Three Breaks IMAX Record With 33,000 Tickets

The film does not open for another eight weeks — and it is already beating the biggest movie of the summer at its own game. The BFI IMAX in London, the largest cinema screen in the UK, sold 33,000 advance tickets for Dune: Part Three in the first 24 hours on sale, for a gross of more than £880,000, according to figures reported by Deadline. That is a new first-day presale record for the venue — and the record it broke belonged to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

Context matters here, because this is the cleanest leaderboard in event cinema: one screen, one 24-hour window, nowhere to hide. The Odyssey took £750,000 on its first day at the same screen. Dune: Part Two managed £366,000. Oppenheimer posted £254,000, and Avatar: Fire and Ash rounds out the top five at £116,000. Part Three did not edge past Nolan's film — it cleared it by £130,000, and it more than doubled what its own predecessor did. One screen. One day.

Why one screen matters

A single-venue record sounds like a trivia note until you remember what this particular screen predicts. The Odyssey went on to sell more than 100,000 admissions at the BFI IMAX, grossing around £2.68 million from that one auditorium at 95% occupancy — the highest-grossing film in the venue's history. Films that detonate here tend to detonate everywhere, because the people buying IMAX 70mm tickets two months early are the loudest audience a blockbuster can have. And the demand is not new: back in April, three opening-weekend screenings of Part Three sold out in under an hour, and two preview screenings vanished earlier this month as well.

It also helps that this is an ending. Part Three is the conclusion of Villeneuve's trilogy, which raises the stakes of the record: this is not a middle chapter coasting on goodwill, it is the finale audiences have been building toward since 2021. Endings sell certainty — everyone fighting for those April tickets knows exactly what they are showing up for in December: the last word on Paul Atreides, on the biggest screen in the country.

What happens next

The BFI is turning December into a full Dune season. Dune and Dune: Part Two return to the screen from 11 December, with Part Two shown on IMAX 70mm film, and Part Three previews begin on 15 December, also in IMAX 70mm, ahead of the general opening on 18 December. Denis Villeneuve's finale brings back Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, with Zendaya, Florence Pugh and Anya Taylor-Joy — a cast built for exactly the kind of screen that just broke a record for it.

My take: presale records are marketing gold, but this one is more than a headline — it is a stress test the film passed two months early. The honest answer: if Part Three holds anything like The Odyssey's pace at this venue, we are not talking about a hit. We are talking about the December box-office story, full stop — and Nolan, of all people, just got a front-row seat to watch his record fall.

Related: Narnia Trailer Shatters Record With 481M Views in 7 Days — another 2026 giant setting records long before release day. Also see Avengers Doomsday trailer leaks and presales — the other presale frenzy quietly building toward December.