BFI Imax, the UK's largest screen, sold 33,000 advance tickets for Dune: Part Three in 24 hours, a new presale record for the venue, per Deadline. The film does not open until December.
The record is a preorder, and the PR machine is reporting it like a box office number. 33,000 tickets in 24 hours and more than 880,000 pounds on a single London screen before a single frame has played. Warner is running a December film like a waitlist and the release calls it demand. A card charge is not a body in a seat, but a record is a record, and nobody is checking the bodies until December.
The leaderboard is the fun part. BFI's first day presale top five lists Dune 3 at 880,000, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey at 750,000, Dune 2 at 366,000, Oppenheimer at 254,000, and Avatar: Fire and Ash at 116,000. One screen. The movie that sold out for months this summer is now a historical artifact, and a film that has not played yet has the bigger number.
The honest question is what happens on December 15. A presale record is a demand statistic, which is exactly the number the machine loves, because you can report the number before the product and the number is already on the transcript by the time the product arrives. The trade press calls it on course for a sellout run like The Odyssey. That is not a prediction, that is a headline that shipped early.
YOUR TURN: Is a presale record a box office number, or an IOU with a very big screen?
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