Avengers: Doomsday vs Dune: Part III: Is It Another Barbenheimer?
This December is going to be a busy month for movie fans. On the same day, Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part III will release on the same day. There’s been a lot of talk debating whether or not these movies will help each other at the box office, or if the competition will hurt each film’s box office. What do I think? Let’s talk about it!
Background Thoughts: This has been a topic of conversation ever since it was announced that Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part III will be releasing on the same day. People are predicting that this’ll be another Barbenheimer event, with Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part III releasing on the same day and it’ll help the box office of both films and be this cultural event. There’s been a few different situations since July 2023 that people thought would be another Barbenheimer, in particular with November 2024 when Wicked and Gladiator II released on the same day, which was titled “Glicked”. That sort of event didn’t really become a thing like Barbenheimer did the previous year.
What is Barbenheimer? Why Did It Work?
To me, I don’t know if Avengers: Dunesday will be another Barbenheimer type event. The reason for that is because Barbenheimer is such an anomaly in popular culture that no other event had been done like that before. For whatever reason, the internet decided that Barbie and Oppenheimer releasing on the same day was absolutely hilarious and made it this event. But the key thing is that Barbie and Oppenheimer are very different movies. Barbie is Greta Gerwig’s take on Barbie that’s a pop feminist movie about girl power with deeper meanings all related to the context of a Barbie doll. Then you have Oppenheimer, the most Oscar-baity film ever directed by Christopher Nolan. It’s a three hour long drama about science and senate hearings that made nearly $1 billion at the box office. Despite the films being wildly different, there was enough overlap in audiences that made people do the double feature of Barbie and Oppenheimer but also films being different from enough. It was the right balance of the same but different to get people excited.
I think that’s the part that people are missing when predicting what another Barbenheimer will be. They’re putting together two movies that don’t have that same cultural event that Barbie and Oppenheimer had. I believe in September 2023, we had Saw X and Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie releasing on the same day, and people were trying to make that another Barbenheimer. The problem with that combination is that there’s no overlap in the target audience. The only people that saw those films opening weekend were grown-ups that were also parents. No 20 year old college student was going to go see Saw X and Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie in the same weekend, because that would be weird.
Will AVENGERS: DUNESDAY Be Another Barbenheimer?
This is a tricky one because I can totally see Avengers: Dunesday being another Barbenheimer, but at the same time I can see a world where it’s also not. The thing that is probably helping these films with the possibility of being another Barbenheimer is that they both have massive amounts of nerd credibility. When I say that, I sort of mean in two different situations on the internet.
With Avengers: Doomsday it’s likely going to be the cultural event of the year. There’s a good chance that it’ll be the highest grossing movie of the year. There’s so much helping this movie with it being the first Avengers movie in 7 years. We’re getting several actors returning most notably Robert Downey Jr but also the Fox X-Men returning in what I’m thinking are major roles. This movie is going to get people to show up and easily make over $1 billion, maybe close to $1.5 billion. You look at the financial success of Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine can clearly see that these multiverse nostalgia films work and get people excited. There’s a lot of MCU skepticism with their brand not being as good as it once was that maybe could hurt the film’s box office. Ultimately, I think Avengers as a brand is enough to get people excited to show up.
When it comes to Dune: Part III, there’s nerd credibility that comes with that. But I the Dune: Part III is a little bit more of the pretentious film Twitter crowd that doesn’t believe that Marvel movies are real cinema. That’s not all of them, but they do sort of attract two different audiences. A vast majority of the people that are going to love Dune: Part III and put it in their top five of 2026 are also the people that are going to look at Avengers: Doomsday and scoff at it because it’s not “cinema”. The Dune movies are more mature and not as family friendly as Avengers, it’s going to attract an older audience. Both films have massive amounts of fans behind them that are getting people excited for these movies.
With all of that out of the way, do I believe that Avengers: Doomsday + Dune: Part III = Avengers: Dunesday, aka another Barbenheimer? I’m not going to say a full blown yes but I think there’s a possibility. I’m 50/50 with this decision making process because I think that there’s enough fan overlap between Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part III to be another Barbenhimer event. Both films have nerd credibility and are two of the most anticipated movies of the year. However, I think what ultimately hurts them from not being another Barbenheimer is that it feels a bit forced. Barbenehimer was of course forced by the internet and making it this thing but it also cam naturally as the internet found it funny that these two movies were releasing on the same day. With this example, it’s coming a bit too forced and the internet trying to make it so hard to happen that it might end up failing. Now, Robert Downey Jr and Timothee Chalamet have both approved of this idea and even during a screening came up with this name. If Disney and Warner Brothers wanna play their cards right, maybe there’s something in the marketing that they can do to make the films feel like a Barbenheimer type event. I don’t know what that’ll look like but especially with Florence Pugh being in both, maybe there’s something to do there.
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