The Marvels won't screen in IMAX unless Warner Bros. and Legendary's Dune: Part Two, which is set to release in theaters one week before Marvel Studios' Captain Marvel sequel, moves off its November 3 release date. Earlier this month, Variety reported the producers behind Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi movie based on Frank Herbert's novel are weighing whether to push back Dune 2's release date to 2024 in the wake of the SAG-AFTRA actors' strike.
But during a recent IMAX earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Richard Gelfond revealed that Dune 2 is set to have a "very long run time in IMAX" (5 to 6 weeks) s — meaning The Marvels won't have access to IMAX screens when it releases on November 10. Gelfond also said that the report claiming that Warner Bros. will delay Dune 2 "is not true", and went on to say: "I feel quite strongly that it's not going to move."
Will Dune 2 get delayed?
"There's another great movie coming out around that time, which is The Marvels from Marvel, and we can't play it because we are committed to Dune," Gelfond explained during the call. If Dune 2 moves off its November 3 release date, those IMAX screens "will just go over to The Marvels, and having a Marvel movie as a backup is not the worst position to be in," he added.
Despite the actors' strike and reports of Dune 2 possibly being delayed, IMAX's CEO said: "Dune is already in the midst of a marketing campaign. There are trailers out. There's lots of materials out. Denis Villeneuve presented at the IMAX CEO Forum. So, it's kind of out of the gate," Gelfond explained. "If you put it back in the gate, you've got to duplicate those expenses at some time in the future."
Unlike the next MCU movie, the Dune sequel was filmed for IMAX, and it's one of the few movies currently featured on the IMAX website, alongside Sony's videogame-based racing film Gran Turismo (August 11), Warner Bros.' upcoming DC movie Blue Beetle (August 18), and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (now screening in theaters), which secured an exclusive three-week run in North America.
Will The Marvels beat Captain Marvel's box office success?
The first Captain Marvel movie, released in 2019, achieved impressive success with a box office earnings of $1.1 billion, but with IMAX already committed to screening Dune 2 this fall, The Marvels faces a hurdle to beat the first movie's box office success, possibly preventing it from earning a billion dollars. Of course, the success of the sequel cannot be determined by its predecessor's achievements alone. Only time will tell if The Marvels can reach the much coveted billion-dollar mark.
