For many years, Hollywood believed in counter programming. When Common launched Mamma Mia! on July 18, 2008, the identical weekend that Warner Bros. put out The Darkish Knight, they hoped to get moviegoers bored with superhero crime epics. Almost twenty years earlier, Disney tried the identical maneuver, placing out the extra household pleasant Honey, I Shrunk the Youngsters in opposition to Tim Burton’s darkish reimagining of Batman on June 23, 1989. However that every one modified in 2023 with “Barbenheimer,” when the simultaneous launch of Barbie and Oppenheimer on July 21 inspired viewers to look at each motion pictures and never select one over the opposite.
Later makes an attempt to copy Barbenheimer have failed (RIP, Noticed Patrol), however Robert Downey Jr. and Timothée Chalamet suppose they may have the following huge factor. When Downey Jr. launched a screening of Chalemet’s new A24 movie Marty Supreme, he noticed (by way of Deadline), “We each have movies opening on December 18, and we determined to coin it … We’re pondering Dunesday.’”
Downey refers, in fact, to Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Half Three. Slick because the portmanteau definitely is, Dunesday doesn’t utterly mirror Barbenheimer just because the 2 motion pictures concerned are much more related than Barbie and Oppenhiemer had been to one another. Barbie was an upbeat however sensible comedic have a look at the well-known toy line, whereas Oppenheimer was a severe biopic concerning the man who helped create the atomic bomb.
Each Dune: Half Three and Avengers: Doomsday are sci-fi franchises that adapt nerdy properties with enormous fan bases. Each movies proceed tales from earlier motion pictures, and each movies come laden with expectations. Dune: Half Three brings to the display screen Frank Herbert‘s Dune Messiah, a tough novel that’s extra about palace intrigue than huge house battles, whereas Avengers: Doomsday seeks to revive the MCU by telling a multiversal story full of acquainted faces, resembling Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and the solid of the 2000s X-Males motion pictures.
