The UK's biggest cinema screen sold 33,000 advance tickets worth £880,000 in a single day, edging past Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.
Denis Villeneuve hasn't released a frame of Dune: Part Three yet and London's biggest screen is already rewriting its own history books.
BFI Imax, the UK's largest cinema screen, sold 33,000 advance tickets for the film within 24 hours of bookings opening, generating more than £880,000 (roughly $988,000), according to Deadline. That's the highest first-day presale total the venue has ever recorded, and it comes months before the film even hits screens in December.
To put that number in context, it overtakes the previous record holder by a comfortable margin. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey had held the top spot with £750,000 in first-day advances. Before that, Dune: Part Two sat at £366,000, Oppenheimer at £254,000, and Avatar: Fire and Ash trailed at £116,000. 123telugu, reporting the same figures, called it a straight takeover of the record The Odyssey had set just months earlier.
The appetite for big-format Villeneuve isn't new at this venue. Three opening-weekend Dune: Part Three screenings reportedly sold out within an hour back in April, and two more preview shows sold out earlier this month, well before this latest presale window even opened.
And the BFI Imax has history with event cinema this year. The Odyssey, per Deadline, had racked up over 100,000 admissions at the screen by mid-August alone, pulling in close to £2.7 million in ticket sales from that single screen at a 95% occupancy rate, making it the venue's highest-grossing release ever until Dune: Part Three's presale numbers arrived to complicate that claim.
The film itself picks up nearly two decades after Dune: Part Two, with Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides dealing with the fallout of his own rule. Old allies resurface, new threats close in, and Chani's reappearance pulls Paul into what's being described as a sweeping conspiracy. Zendaya returns alongside Jason Momoa, Robert Pattinson and Florence Pugh.
The BFI isn't just banking on the new film either. Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two return to the big screen from December 11, with Part Two projected off an Imax 70mm print, ahead of Dune: Part Three previews that begin at the venue in Imax 70mm from December 15.
Dune: Part Two eventually crossed $714 million worldwide. The Odyssey, for comparison, has pulled in $1.8 billion this year, a chunk of it from premium large-format screens exactly like this one. Whether Part Three can chase those numbers once it actually opens in December is the question BFI Imax's presale chart has just made a lot more interesting.
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