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Warner Bros. moved Denis Villeneuve’s Dune from November 20, 2020 to December 18, 2020. The initial plan was to launch the first of what may or may not be a two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel on what is generally the high-fantasy weekend of the holiday season. But instead, it’s opening not on the weekend before Thanksgiving but the weekend before Christmas. It’s arguably avoiding a showdown with Marvel’s Eternals and attempting to assert itself as the Star Wars/Lord of the Rings of the 2020 holiday season.

The pre-Thanksgiving launchpad that has proven successful for four of the eight Harry Potter movies (2001, 2002, 2005 and 2010), four of the five Twilight movies (2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012) and the three Hunger Games sequels (2013, 2014 and 2015). It was also a fine launching pad for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in 2016. It was less so for Justice League in 2017 and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018, but I digress. I still maintain that Disney’s choice to move Frozen II to November 22, 2019 signals that it’s as much a “young adult fantasy adventure” as it is a kid-targeted animated sequel.

When Warner Bros. reacted to The Crimes of Grindelwald by moving Fantastic Beasts 3 to November 12, 2021 (giving the third J.K. Rowling prequel an extra year to re-calibrate and hopefully avoided a Dark Phoenix or Divergent: Allegiant-type disaster), they threw Dune into that pre-Thanksgiving slot. But now they are shifting from just before Thanksgiving to just before Christmas. Marvel’s star-studded (Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, Richard Madden, Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan) MCU fantasy about all-powerful beings living on Earth and shaping history may prove too similar to Legendary’s star-studded (Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Jason Momoa, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Oscar Isaac, Dave Bautista, etc.) intergalactic space opera.Today In: Consumer

The other scenario is that Warner Bros. is positioning Dune as next year’s Star Wars/Lord of the Rings. If the pre-Thanksgiving weekend is where Warner Bros., Summit and Lionsgate have opened their YA fantasy franchise flicks, then the pre-Christmas weekend has long been home to the year-end fantasy dynamo. This has been “a thing” at least since 1995 when Sony’s Jumanji legged it out to $100 million from an $11 million debut weekend. That Christmas-to-New Year’s period, two weeks when kids are out of school, and adults are off from work, is a gold mine for movies big and small in terms of long legs and ridiculous multipliers.

Whether you count Titanic as a “fantasy adventure,” this slot was also home, give or take the flukes of the calendar, to the three Lord of the Ring movies, King Kong, Avatar, Tron: Legacy, the three Hobbit prequels, three of Disney’s four Star Wars movies and Aquaman. All these films had good-to-great opening weekends and much longer legs than they would have enjoyed opening at any other time of the year. If Dune successfully asserts itself as the big fantasy epic of the Christmas season, the spice may flow well into February.

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