Doomsday

Doomsday. Disney’s response has been to invent its own IMAX

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On December 18, 2026, two of the most anticipated blockbusters of the last decade share release date. Warner Bros. has contracted exclusivity on all IMAX screens in the United States for ‘Dune: Part Three’ for three weeks. It is a vital space for the box office blockbusters of this type, so Disney, following Bender’s teachings on the moon from the legendary pilot episode of ‘Futurama’, decides to set up its own IMAX for ‘Doomsday‘. He called it Infinity Vision. The contract of evil. The key is in a contract signed before both premieres collided. Warner Bros. booked December 18, 2026 for ‘Dune: Part Three’ in June 2024, almost a year before Disney moved ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ on that same date. Under this contract, Villeneuve’s film has all IMAX screens blocked for three consecutive weeks starting December 18, leaving the Marvel film without access to that circuit in the US market. In favor of ‘Dune’. In addition to the contractual issue, there is an added topic: ‘Dune: Part Three’ has been filmed mainly with 65mm IMAX cameraswhile ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ has done so with IMAX certified digital cameras. For the IMAX standard, there is a difference: the 65mm negative produces a native image in the expanded format of the characteristic IMAX screens, which makes ‘Dune 3’ a more technically competent release. Something that IMAX will undoubtedly use as a selling ingredient. Despite insistent rumors, it seems that Marvel will not move the release date, and Kevin Feige confirmed it at CinemaCon. Infinity Vision arrives. It was there where Disney announced Infinity Vision as a new certification for premium rooms. This is a seal that will help the viewer “find the best screens in their area.” This rating refers to the largest possible screen sizes, laser projection for superior brightness and sharpness, and premium audio formats for an immersive sound experience. That is to say, about 75 certified rooms in the United States and more than 300 globally. What Infinity Vision is not. It is not a new format. It is simply a certification for rooms that already exist and can boast high-quality equipment. IMAX, with its characteristic aspect ratio of 1.43:1, is a different experience from traditional cinema, a space that Infinity Vision does not come out of, no matter how much it is applied to high-quality screens. The Infinity Vision certificate will start with the re-release of ‘Endgame’, as an appetizer before the arrival of ‘Doomsday’. Why IMAX matters. To understand why Disney has a problem, let’s look at the numbers. IMAX occupies less than 5% of the screens, but for large studio productions it represents between 15% and 25% of the collection of the first weekend. For example, ‘Dune: Part Two‘ grossed $81.5 million domestically and $178.5 million worldwide in its opening weekend, with premium formats (IMAX and 70mm) accounting for 48% of the total opening business. That is, almost half of the box office concentrated in a small percentage of the theaters. With ‘Oppenheimer’, IMAX generated 35 million global dollars in the premiere alone, 20% of the opening total. EITHER said by the CEO of IMAX himselfRichard Gelfond: the format has added 15% of the box office in premium releases during 2025. IMAX’s global revenues are on track to exceed $1.4 billion in 2026and ‘Dune 3’ is one of the main drivers of that growth. Disney, for its part, is the largest contributor to IMAX revenue among all the Hollywood studios, which gives an idea of ​​the volume of business that is at stake with ‘Doomsday’. The precedent. In 2025, Jurassic World Rebirth was one of the few big blockbusters that could not have a premiere in IMAX for scheduling reasons. Some analysts blame this for its somewhat weaker performance than other deliveries. Meanwhile, Warner has already reported that the 70mm IMAX screenings of ‘Dune: Part Three’ they have already sold out in 19 locations in North America and London. A panorama for ‘Doomsday’ that, although it does not point to problems for what will undoubtedly be one of the great assets at the box office this year, may have more than one anxious executive in the Disney offices. In Xataka | If you download ‘Torrente Presidente’, Santiago Segura has the same message for you as if you downloaded ‘Torrente 3’

Doomsday’ are released at the same time and Hollywood already wants to sell us a new Barbenheimer. But it’s not the same

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Warner Bros. and Disney are going to release their two big bets of the year (‘Dune: Part Three’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday‘) on the same date: December 18, 2026. The industry has not seen something like this for years. In fact, we haven’t seen it since the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and the question is whether its effect at the box office can be repeated… when the two films share exactly the same audience. Dunesday, or whatever you want to call it. The two most powerful Hollywood studios, two of the most popular franchises in recent years, a single date. The industry already has a nickname for the event: “Dunesday“. But the fact that both coincide on that date does not respond to an agreed strategy. ‘Dune: Part Three’ arrived first in the pre-Christmas gap. ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ was initially scheduled for May 2025, but postponements derived from the strikes of actors and scriptwriters pushed it to where it is now, from where it is unlikely to move since on websites, networks and others there is a countdown in motion until the inevitable premiere. The Barbenheimer precedent. Summer 2023 was left for the annals thanks to the coincidence of two very different films, ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’, on the same weekend in July. The combined weekend exceeded $300 million in the US alonebecoming the fourth best in historyonly behind the three opening weekends of ‘Avengers: Endgame’, ‘Infinity War’ and ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’. Different audiences, even different motivations for going to the movies, but a curious, almost miraculous real possibility of doing a very rare double program on the same day. Why Dunesday is different. ‘Dune: Part Three’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ don’t work like that. Both target similar viewers: devotees of science fiction and big-budget action, with a predominantly male base (this is important). Significantly or coincidentally, both feature Florence Pugh in their casts, which illustrates the extent to which they are not identical films, but do have their roots in a shared territory of blockbuster Hollywood. The idea of ​​Dunesday, as Variety says, is not to propose two different and complementary plans, but to fill the respectable with a giant dose of similar things. Why don’t they wiggle. That neither film wants to move from that date has a concrete explanation, prior to the invention of Dunesday: there are not many good gaps in that part of the year. Sony releases ‘Jumanji 3’ on December 11, a week early. Further back, the first weekend of December is usually a black hole at the box office (families are shopping, not in theaters), and Thanksgiving is traditionally occupied by Disney’s animated bet, because it is a more family-friendly box office weekend. December 18 is the best date available for two films that need a strong start. What if it works? If the experiment works, the combined box office could be among the best weekends in history. In any case, here we find the usual problem: that July 2023 generated a social phenomenon (costumes, double sessions planned weeks before, debates on networks, friendly rivalry between the actors of the films, who encouraged people to go to both) that was organized outside the industry. “Dunesday” arrives much more in advance and with a slight air of a commercial montage. That’s not going to make the films click, of course, but the truth is that we are dealing with phenomena with nuances that go in opposite directions. In Xataka | The reality of Spanish cinema: ‘Torrente’ has brought more people to theaters this weekend than any film since 2019

Doomsday’ are indistinguishable from the real thing. In the end, Scorsese was right

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Last weekend, YouTube Screen Culture and KH Studio permanently closedchannels based in India and Georgia that accumulated more than 2 million subscribers and one billion views between them. They had been making AI-generated trailers so convincing they were indistinguishable from official promotional materials for months. The phenomenon has reached epidemic proportions with ‘Avengers: Doomsday’where the border between the authentic and the synthetic has become practically undetectable. What has happened? Marvel’s strategy of projecting four exclusive movie teasers ahead of ‘Avatar: Fire and Ashes’‘ (one each week, focusing on different characters) has created the perfect breeding ground for confusion. Without official online distribution, any user who wanted to see them had to rely on an ecosystem of leaks that, as Kotaku states, It’s been broken for years. And in the midst of this information void, generative AI had its day: images showing Doctor Doom began to emerge from under the stones. as “Stark clone”, clips supposedly filmed in theaters and deepfakes of a refinement that deceived the most expert eye. Increasingly sophisticated. A study published by Nature already in 2024 revealed that more than 53% of humans can be fooled by digitally altered videos, while recent academic research They talk about detection tools deepfakes They have difficulty identifying manipulations outside of their training data. With this breeding ground, it is normal that there are more and more fake trailers and images, immersed in a continuous generation of content of this type: on social networks, 71% of images are generated by AI. And it is estimated that they have been published since 2023 more than 10 billion pages generated by AI. Marvel pre-slop. The paradox of this situation is that Marvel did not need AI intervention to become synthetic content. It already was. When Martin Scorsese stated in 2019 that the Marvel films were not cinema but “theme parks” where the actors did “the best they could under those circumstances”, he was actually talking about the fact that the franchises had replaced the human with the algorithmic, which were engineering products devoid of the living component that defines cinema. The visionary thing about it: he did it before ChatGPT came into our lives. We all know how Marvel movies are made (and what first led to that image of fdepersonalized acting in mass-produced films; and second, to the famous “superhero fatigue”), and they fit perfectly with that idea of ​​”movies made by AI before AI”: effects artists changing entire third acts two months before the premieres, films shot on sets with huge green screens generating sequences where 99% of what we see is digitaldifferent proposals but with narrative decisions (especially in their final sections) completely interchangeable… The first mess. Let’s go back to ‘Spiderman: No Way Home‘ to analyze one of the most striking cases of information and misinformation of this type, with the direct precedent of generative AI: the deepfakes. For months they circulated supposedly leaked images of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man suits. Garfield repeatedly denied involvementstating that the material was Photoshop. Then a YouTuber posted a video claiming to have created a deepfake of the leaked footage, only to later admit that his video was fake and the original video was real. In Corridor Crew They determined that it would be “the most sophisticated deepfake ever created” if it were fake. Sony applied copyright strikes against leaks, implicit confirmation of authenticity. Result: fans spent six months not knowing what was real, but they spread it anyway. Studies on different fandoms reveal that the search for belonging drives the spread of misinformation as much as that of legitimate information. More chaos: the algorithms optimize based on popularitymore than for the quality. And the metrics of engagement can be manipulated through behavior of a deceptive nature: bots, organized trolls, networks of fake accounts… A cocoa. The result: an attention market where manufacturing synthetic content about ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ generates more adhesion, diffusion and popularity than bothering to verify its authenticity. But AI did not create this problem: it only accelerated it until it became unsustainable. And we are not even talking about “serious” topics, linked to politics or society and where real interests already come into play to falsify the content, beyond the mere more or less hooligan fun of spreading a fake trailer. The closing of the house of fake trailers. The closure of Screen Culture and KH Studio by YouTube comes after a conflict that began when both channels in March were demonetized. To avoid this, they added tags such as “fan trailer”, “parody” or “concept trailer” to their titles and recovered monetization. But those warnings disappeared again, and they created 23 versions of fake ‘Fantastic Four’ trailers, some of them surpassing the official videos in search results. But there was an additional controversy: in the Deadline investigation On the subject, it was revealed that several studios, such as Warner and Sony, had secretly requested that YouTube have the advertising revenue from these AI videos bounce back to them, which leaves this not in the field of ethics, but of economic benefit. YouTube tolerated the proliferation of synthetic content for years, even allowing studios to monetize material that misled their own audiences, and only stopped when Disney, which owns Marvel, sent a cease and desist letter to Googleowner of YouTube. In Xataka | OpenAI and Disney have signed an agreement so you can generate AI videos of your favorite characters. It’s what Sora needed

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