Warner Bros. and Legendary’s “Dune: Part Two” is enjoying the biggest opening weekend the box office has seen in nearly five months. After taking in $32 million through Friday, Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic is set for a $75 million-plus opening weekend from 4,071 screens.
That’s the highest opening weekend since the $80 million opening of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” in October and lifts overall domestic grosses above $100 million for the first time since the last weekend of 2023.
It’s also well above the $41 million opening weekend of the first “Dune,” which opened in October 2021 amidst COVID-19 concerns and with a day-and-date release on streaming.
With its immense action scenes and tragic love story, “Dune: Part Two” has enjoyed a critical and audience reception even stronger than that of “Dune: Part One” with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 94% critics and 95% audience to go with an A on CinemaScore. By comparison, “Part One” earned RT scores of 83% critics and 90% audience to go with an A- CinemaScore grade.
With this start, “Dune: Part Two” is well on its way to passing the $433 million global theatrical run of its predecessor, though how far it goes will depend on how much it can expand its audience with this word of mouth against upcoming competition. But next week’s releases — the family film “Kung Fu Panda 4” and the horror film “Imaginary” — likely won’t have significant overlap.
In an effort to increase interest among audiences intrigued by the acclaim for “Dune” but who had not seen “Part One” yet, Warner Bros. re-released that film in theaters and licensed it to Netflix to stream in the leadup to the release of “Part Two.” We will see in the coming weeks how much that adds to this blockbuster’s legs.
