It’s March, and we’ve got our first big movie for 2024 in Warner Bros. and Legendary’s Dune: Part Two. Even as its release date shifted around a few times, there’s been a palpable excitement in the air for the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, and that was before it was getting high marks from nearly everyone. Financially, it’s starting off on the right foot and doing better than originally projected.
Beyond its collective star power and heavy marketing, folks seemed to groove with Part One in the years since its release, if they weren’t already into it. It also helps that there’s nothing else quite on this level in terms of blockbuster scale, and it looks like something worth going out to see in the theaters: per Deadline, $32.2 million of its global take came from IMAX screenings, and it’s now the second-biggest global weekend for an IMAX film behind Batman v Superman in 2016.
Tentpole-wise, the month of March has some other big films on the horizon: Kung Fu Panda 4 drops next week for the kids, along with Blumhouse’s Imaginary. Then we’ve got Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire towards the end of the month on March 22, concluding with WB and Legendary’s own Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire on the 29th. At the moment, Dune has word of mouth on its side, ditto a desire to see this all come to a close with an eventual adaptation of Dune Messiah and those popcorn buckets, so time will tell how those movies fare against it.
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