‘Dune: Part Two’ Keeps Rising at Box Office With $81.5 Million Opening

Warner Bros/Legendary’s “Dune: Part Two” is continuing to beat box office projections with $20 million grossed from 4,078 theaters on Sunday. Based on those results, domestic opening weekend estimates have risen from $75 million to $81.5 million

If Denis Villeneuve’s sequel once again beats projections on Sunday, it could more than double the $41 million domestic opening that the first “Dune” grossed in October 2021. That was considered a strong start at the time given the film’s day-and-date release on streaming, COVID-19 concerns keeping older moviegoers home, and the sci-fi film’s dense source material.

But Villeneuve, Legendary and Warner Bros. have turned Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel into a true blockbuster, with “Part Two” enjoying incredible critical and audience praise with a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, 5/5 from general audiences on PostTrak, and an A on CinemaScore. The end result is the highest opening weekend ever for director Denis Villeneuve as well as for stars Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson and Austin Butler.

Audience demographics for “Dune” skewed towards millennials and Gen X moviegoers, with 64% of audiences over the age of 25 and the 25-34 age demographic having the largest opening day turnout at 34%. As expected, premium formats took up nearly half of the film’s ticket sales at 48%, with Imax alone taking 23% with $18.5 million grossed this weekend.

With next weekend’s competition being a family film — Universal/DreamWorks’ “Kung Fu Panda 4” — and a horror film that will likely cater primarily to Gen Z — Lionsgate/Blumhouse’s “Imaginary” — “Dune: Part Two” will have a clear lane for itself as it takes its excellent word-of-mouth tries to leg out through March.

The film is set to easily exceed the $433 million global run of the first “Dune” and become Villeneuve’s biggest box office hit by a wide margin. That’s good news for Legendary as it covered 80% of the film’s $190 million production budget, with Warner Bros. covering the remainder and handling distribution.

In a distant second is Paramount’s “Bob Marley: One Love,” which is still holding decently given the competition with $7.4 million in its third weekend. With $82.7 million domestic and $146 million globally, the film is already set to turn a modest profit theatrically and is hoping to serve as an alternative to the bigger spectacles hitting theaters in March.

Lionsgate/Kingdom Story Company’s “Ordinary Angels” is in third with $3.8 million, giving the film a 10-day total of $12 million as it is close to making back its production budget. Sony’s struggling “Madame Web” is in fourth with $3.2 million, giving it a total of $40 million domestic and $90 million worldwide after three weekends against an $80 million budget.

Fathom Events completes the top 5 with its release of episodes 7-8 of Angel Studios’ “The Chosen: Season 4,” grossing $3.1 million from 2,215 locations. That’s a step down from the $3.5 million grossed by episodes 4-6, but down from the $6 million that the first three episodes grossed during its run.

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