There are still a few days left in 2025, but movie buffs already have plenty of reasons to set their sights on 2026. Will any changes Christopher Nolan makes to The Odyssey be “historical inaccuracies”, or a vibe? Just how much will the next Hunger Games movie, Sunrise on the Reaping, absolutely break our hearts?
Amid all of that early speculation, a new name has been picking up steam: “Dunesday.” The portmanteau mashes up two of the biggest blockbusters that are set to arrive in 2026: Warner Bros.’ Dune: Part Three and Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Doomsday. The kicker is that both are currently scheduled to be released on the same exact day: Friday, December 18, 2026.
While this shared release date has quietly been the case for several months now, it has been brought to more people’s attention amid the bizarre early teaser trailers for Doomsday, each of which end with a real-time countdown to that December 18th date. As Marvel has begun to stake their claim through their marketing, new comments on The Town podcast has indicated that Dune also has no plans of moving from the December 18th date. So… are we about to have another “Barbenheimer” on our hands in 2026?
There is always the very real possibility that either film could move away from the December 18th date. There has already been speculation that Dune would move to earlier in the year, to coincide with a premiere at the Venice Film Festival. And even as Doomsday‘s marketing campaign has begun to commit to that date, that commitment has been drowned out by the conversation around the teasers themselves, so a move could still be possible. And let’s be honest, nearly every film in Marvel’s Multiverse Saga has shifted release dates in one way or another, so it absolutely would not be unprecedented.
Barbenheimer 2.0?
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that neither Dune or Doomsday moves from that December 18th release date. Would both of them releasing on the same day really lead to a repeat of “Barbenheimer”, the unprecedented box office smash of both Barbie and Oppenheimer in the summer of 2023? That’s not necessarily a guarantee, even with how well both franchise halves of “Dunesday” have already done at the box office.
One key element of “Barbenheimer” that seems to be getting lost in the “Dunesday” conversation is the movies themselves. It wasn’t just that Barbie and Oppenheimer were so fundamentally different from each other, leading to countless memes and costumes combining the bright pink and tortured grey aesthetics. It was that both movies were extremely accessible: regardless of how much you knew about the cultural iconography of Barbie, or about the real-life history of J. Robert Oppenheimer, you could still walk into the movies and follow what you were seeing. Neither of those qualifiers are the case with either half of Dunesday.
In terms of accessibility, one is a threequel (which also plans to adapt one of the most controversial books of Frank Herbert’s source material), and the other is a massive tapestry not only of the MCU and the Multiverse Saga, but of decades of Marvel movies, just as a lot of the audience has started to get burned out with following it. And in terms of tone, both have the potential to be harrowing blockbusters that put their characters through the wringer (particularly Doomsday, since it will be followed by Avengers: Secret Wars a year later).
There’s also the timing of it all. “Barbenheimer” became the double feature that people didn’t know they needed amid the dead heat of summer: a time when moviegoers categorically have more free time, a desire to escape to a temperature-controlled movie theater, and the money to spend on the rising costs of movie tickets. By December 18th, an average moviegoer is most likely focused on the holiday season, buying presents for their loved ones, and getting their ducks in a row for the new year. They might have the time and resources to go see one big movie in theaters during the holiday season (as box office returns have proven time and time again), but it’s not necessarily a guarantee.
The fact of the matter is that we haven’t properly had a “Barbenheimer” in the years since the summer of 2023. Fans have tried to make similar trends happen, but to nowhere near the amount of success. When both Wicked: Part One and Gladiator II released on the same day in November of 2024, the idea of a “Glicked” double feature did not catch on, and more people ended up seeing Wicked. The same could be said for Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps being released within weeks of each other this past July: as much as fans said they were going to do a “SuperTastic” double feature in theaters, the conversation and box office returns clearly shifted in favor of Superman. There’s absolutely no guarantee that “Dunesday” is going to capture the magic successfully this time around… and that’s okay.
(featured image: Warner Bros./Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
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