Why you should be deliriously excited about this upcoming sci-fi showdown

2026 is going to be a big year for movies. Christopher Nolan will return with a new epic: The Odyssey. Ryan Gosling will star in the huge sci-fi flick Project Hail Mary. We’re getting a Wuthering Heights adaptation, a Devil Wears Prada sequel, a Supergirl movie and a new Spider-Man film. Whatever your tastes, there will be something for you.

But the sweetest plums won’t drop until the end of the year. On December 18, we’ll return to Arrakis for the third and final film in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy. The cast and crew have done a wonderful job bringing the first two films to life, and I can’t wait to see what they have in store for the climax.

But lo, a new challenger approaches. On that same day, December 18, Disney will release Avengers: Doomsday, the first Avengers movie since Endgame in 2019. Marvel never misses with its big tentpole projects. Which one of these mega-films will come out on top, or will they boost each other up?

Bloodbath or Barbenheimer 2?

Avengers: Dunesday?

On July 23, 2023, Warner Bros. released Barbie, a fantasy comedy about the iconic doll, into theaters. On that same day, Universal put out Christopher Nolan’s latest opus: Oppenheimer, a stately biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. Both movies were high-profile and high-quality, but they couldn’t be more different in tone and temperament, and that set off people’s imaginations.

The “Barbenheimer” meme started picking up steam months ahead of time: what if people saw the films on the same day? What if they dressed up for the occasion? It’s hard to know exactly how much money the meme added to the box office, but we know it generated a ton of interest and free publicity, and we know that both films cleaned up: Barbie made nearly $1.5 billion while Oppenheimer took in $975 million. I doubt either Warner Bros. or Universal were upset that people were conflating these movies, not when it was helping their bottom lines this much.

The question is: can this lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon repeat itself? Will people want to see Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday on the same day as part of some epic double feature?

Well, there is a ready-made portmanteau: Dunesday, so the double-header has that going for it. But there are some key differences between this and Barbenheimer. While Barbie and Oppenheimer were completely different kinds of films, Dune 3 and Doomsday are both big, expensive genre epics, no doubt with spectacular special effects and larger-than-life action. Oppenheimer was like a porterhouse steak and Barbie a fluffy key lime pie; eaten one after the other, you get a carnival of different flavors. But Dune 3 and Doomsday are both double stacks of pancakes, and people may not want to scarf all of them all at once.

Plus, both of those movies will probably run for around three hours each, around the length of Oppenheimer. Barbie, on the other hand, clocked in at just under two hours, which made a double feature manageable. Maybe people will be willing to sit down for six hours to enjoy Dunesday, but my gut tells me that they’re going to choose one movie or the other. So the next question is: which will it be?

If only one film can win, it deserves to be Dune

Timothée ChalaYAY!

Marvel has been king of the movies for over a decade at this point, starting with Iron Man back in 2008 and lasting all the way through Avengers: Endgame. After that, the franchise started to slacken a bit. Marvel TV shows released on Disney+ started to feel like homework for the movies, which were themselves dropping in quality. They were still good watches, but there were too many middling films mixed in there. A recent example is Captain America: Brave New World, one of the most disappointing movies of 2025.

Avengers: Doomsday will bring back franchise favorites like Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, and Robert Downey Jr. as villain Doctor Doom. And that will be fun to see, but it kind of reads like a franchise that’s playing the old hits for want of ability to create new ones. Meanwhile, Denis Villeneuve is charging headlong into unknown territory. Dune has been adapted to the screen before, but never half so good as in these two recent films, which adapt the first book in Frank Herbert’s series. Dune: Part Three will adapt Dune Messiah, the second book in that series, which has never made its way to the big screen. It’s much more insular and intimate than the first book, as Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is done fighting to become emperor of the universe and now has to deal with the drudgery of actually ruling. It’s potentially difficult material, but after Parts One and Two, Villeneuve and his team have more than earned my trust.

To sum up, I feel excited to see Dune: Part Three and kind of obligated to see Avengers: Doomsday, so if I have to choose a horse in this race, it’s not a hard pick.

Release Date: December 18, 2026
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve
Producers: Mary Parent
Prequel(s): Dune, Dune: Part Two
Franchise(s): Dune

Timothée Chalamet

Paul Atreides
Florence Pugh

Princess Irulan
Anya Taylor-Joy

Alia Atreides

Dune vs Doomsday might be even better

Why be friends when you can be rivals?

All that said, even if a Dunesday double-header meme doesn’t take off, I can see both movies benefiting anyway. What if, instead of a double feature, we get fans divided into two camps, each trying to convince the other to see their favorite movie on opening day? That will still create lots of energy to see these films in the theater, and movies theaters can use all the help they can get right now, what with Netflix buying Warner Bros. Sooner or later, I expect Netflix to take whatever movies Warner Bros. makes and shuffle them directly onto streaming, or at least to cut down significantly on the amount of time they spend in theaters.

But there are ways to resist this shift. Big events like Barbenheimer and Dunesday, whatever form it ends up taking, help theaters pack in people, which generates lots of money. And that could keep theaters around for a while longer.

Barbie screen on HBO Max with Margot Robbie in a pink car.

These HBO Max movies are better than what Netflix recommends

These five movies on HBO Max are so good, you’ll forget you have a Netflix account.

The coward’s way

It’s also possible that Disney or Warner Bros. could just move one of these movies off this date; technically Dune did have the date first, so if anybody’s going to move it should be Doomsday, but I hope that doesn’t happen. I’m too interested to see how this plays out.