Robert Downey Jr. and Timothée Chalamet Want to Make Dunesday the Next Barbenheimer

For decades, Hollywood believed in counter programming. When Universal released Mamma Mia! on July 18, 2008, the same weekend that Warner Bros. put out The Dark Knight, they hoped to get moviegoers uninterested in superhero crime epics. Nearly two decades earlier, Disney tried the same maneuver, putting out the more family friendly Honey, I Shrunk the Kids against Tim Burton’s dark reimagining of Batman on June 23, 1989. But that all changed in 2023 with “Barbenheimer,” when the simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer on July 21 encouraged viewers to watch both movies and not choose one over the other.

Later attempts to replicate Barbenheimer have failed (RIP, Saw Patrol), but Robert Downey Jr. and Timothée Chalamet think they might have the next big thing. When Downey Jr. introduced a screening of Chalemet’s new A24 film Marty Supreme, he observed (via Deadline), “We both have films opening on December 18, and we decided to coin it … We’re thinking Dunesday.'”

Downey refers, of course, to Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three. Slick as the portmanteau certainly is, Dunesday doesn’t completely mirror Barbenheimer simply because the two movies involved are a lot more similar than Barbie and Oppenhiemer were to each other. Barbie was an upbeat but smart comedic look at the famous toy line, while Oppenheimer was a serious biopic about the man who helped create the atomic bomb.

Both Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday are sci-fi franchises that adapt nerdy properties with huge fan bases. Both films continue stories from previous movies, and both films come laden with expectations. Dune: Part Three brings to the screen Frank Herbert‘s Dune Messiah, a tricky novel that’s more about palace intrigue than big space battles, while Avengers: Doomsday seeks to revive the MCU by telling a multiversal story filled with familiar faces, such as Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and the cast of the 2000s X-Men movies.

More importantly, Barbenheimer had higher stakes because it felt like it would reignite moviegoing as a past time. At the worst points of the global pandemic, theaters shut down and studios switched to streaming, making it seem as though going to the cinema was an outdated activity, like planking or stuffing a bunch of people into phone booths in the 1950s. Barbenheimer acted as a celebration of everything great about the cinematic experience, the glory of the big screen, and the joy of watching movies together.

Certainly, some of that will be present in both Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday. The first Denis Villeneuve Dune film debuted on HBO Max the same day it was in theaters and Disney sent its MCU entry Black Widow straight to streaming. Further, the MCU continues to lose its position in the culture, and its unclear if fans will want to see Villeneuve make a dour movie heavy on politics, with Chalamet playing a more morally unsavory version of Paul Atreides.

If the movies do grab the attention of viewers, Dunesday could very well be a Barbenheimer sequel, celebrating the cinema through sci-fi spectacle. But if moviegoers show no interest in either, Dunesday will be the worst type of non-counterprogramming, two movies that appeal to no one.

Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three come to theaters on December 18, 2026.