The Screens Were Spoken For. Disney built its own format rather than go without them.
Two wide releases open on December 18, 2026, and one of them holds the IMAX screens. That was settled ten months before the date, by which point the only decision left to the other studio was what to build instead.
You know the date meeting. A release date goes up on the board eighteen months out, somebody says it is a strong date, and the room agrees. Then the conversation moves to cast availability and a marketing beat in the spring, and the premium-format question gets left where it usually gets left — for later, when the picture is further along and there is something to show.
The trouble with later is that the screens are not allocated later. They are allocated by someone else, on their own calendar, and that calendar runs ahead of yours.
Two films, one December Friday, one chain of screens
Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three both open in the United States on Friday, December 18, 2026. IMAX is a single chain of screens and it can only run one of them on an opening weekend.
It is running Dune. IMAX said so itself in an investor presentation that two outlets read and reported on February 26, 2026 — GamesRadar, citing slide 13 of the deck, and Gizmodo the same day. Ten months before the release.
On every measure of demand we took, Avengers is the larger film and it is not close: 95.3% of head-term search, 96.8% of trailer searches, 86.1% of official-trailer comments, 64.9% of trailer views. The narrowest gap is ticket searches at 73.2%, 90,500 to 33,100, and that is the measure sitting closest to someone actually buying.
Screen certification applications Disney reported from exhibitors worldwide for Infinity Vision, its own premium large-format program, roughly ten weeks after announcing it. The studio holding a 95-to-5 demand advantage responded to losing the screens by building a competing format.
That is a measurement of what the screens were worth, and it is made of behavior rather than projection. Losing one chain for one opening weekend was expensive enough to justify standing up a certification program and recruiting thousands of exhibitor screens into it inside a quarter.
| № | The decision | The window | What it buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Which date goes on the board — and whether you are willing to share it | 18+ months out | The collision, or the avoidance of it |
| 02 | Whether to bid for premium-format precedence, before the format holder’s own planning locks | Settled by February 2026 for a December 2026 date | The screens |
| 03 | Whether to pay into an incumbent format or build one | Seven weeks after losing the screens | A format you control |
| 04 | How many exhibitor screens to certify, and how fast | Ten weeks to 7,500 applications | Reach without the incumbent |
| 05 | Whether to move the date once the format question has resolved against you | Any time before marketing commits | Escape from the collision |
The window closed in the winter
IMAX × Dune: Part Three
January–April 2026The story surfaced on January 16, 2026, when World of Reel reported a post by the account Empire City Box Office on X claiming Dune had all IMAX screens for three weeks. The outlet hedged it heavily — “apparently”, “according to” — and on its own it was a rumor.
Six weeks later it stopped being one. IMAX confirmed the precedence in its own investor presentation on February 26, 2026, and by April 6 had early IMAX 15/70 tickets on sale ahead of the wide date in nineteen locations worldwide: fifteen in North America, two in Canada, one in Melbourne, one in London.
The allocation was reported where distribution leads do not look, by a company that was not keeping it secret.
Disney × Infinity Vision
April–June 2026On April 16, 2026, at CinemaCon, Disney announced Infinity Vision — its own certification program for premium large-format screens, offering branding and marketing support to exhibitors who qualify. Seven weeks after the IMAX presentation.
IMAX’s chief financial officer, Natasha Fernandes, called it a marketing play on April 30. By June 24, Disney reported more than 7,500 screen applications from exhibitors worldwide.
Whether the program closes the gap on a December weekend is a separate question this study does not answer. It establishes the price the losing studio was willing to pay rather than go without.
When a scarce allocation goes against you, the remaining decisions are all more expensive than the one you did not make in time.
The answer engines recommend the smaller film
We put two questions to ChatGPT and Perplexity, three identical calls each. Asked which film is bigger, every instrument says Avengers. Asked which one to go and see, Perplexity named Dune: Part Three all three times and gave the premium-format reason every time. ChatGPT declined to choose in two of three, and in the third flagged the same constraint before calling Avengers the more accessible of the two.
The demand data and the recommendation layer disagree because they answer different questions. One is about how many people want a thing. The other is about which experience is available on the night.
There is a crack in that recommendation. Perplexity stated the exclusivity ran “at least its first three weeks” all three times, and the article it cited contains no duration at all. Three weeks traces back to the January post on X; the claim that traces to IMAX’s own presentation describes the opening weekend. The engines took the weaker number and stated it with confidence.
The honest limits, including one of ours
This study’s own pre-registered brief had the release date wrong. It said December 19; all six model answers said December 18, and the models were right, because December 18 is a Friday and US wide releases open on Fridays. The error came from a trade article read once and not checked against a second source — the rule this practice applies to everything except, that day, its own premise.
The second miss is larger. The brief named the right seat, whoever allocates premium-format screens, and then registered that decision as live. It was not. The allocation had resolved before we measured anything, and the engines were reporting an outcome rather than forecasting one. Picking the right seat and assuming an open decision is half a hit, and the half that missed is the half that decides whether a study is useful.
Nothing here observes a ticket sold, and the allocation itself is reported by outlets reading a deck we did not retrieve. Keyword volumes are Google’s advertising bands rather than counts, so 95.3% and 73.2% are band ratios and should be read as ordering. The trailer comparison is one official trailer per title published four months apart, which cuts toward Dune and makes 86.1% a floor. Both engines were read at the platform-default tier, on one day, from one location, and the brief registered a negative control that was never appointed because no true negative was available.
The prediction on the research page is registered and dated: Avengers: Doomsday takes the larger three-day domestic gross, at 65%, against 30% for Dune: Part Three and 5% for the two landing within 5% of each other. It resolves on Monday, December 21, 2026 from the reported three-day domestic figures, and the result is published whichever way it goes.
- Your release shares a date with a comparable title — a collision turns a premium format from a nice-to-have into a resource only one of you can hold.
- The scarce thing is a single chain or supplier — where premium capacity is spread across several providers, precedence is not zero-sum and none of this binds.
- The holder of that capacity publishes to investors — IMAX confirmed this allocation in its own presentation ten months out, so the information was public long before it was news.
- You still have a date you could move — once marketing commits, the cheapest remaining option is gone.
- It is not yours if your audience does not pay for format — the premium surcharge is the whole mechanism, and for a picture nobody needs a larger screen for there is nothing to win.
Move the premium-format question from the marketing agenda to the date-setting agenda.
The question is when the window stops being available, and that date belongs on the board beside the release date. For each date you are holding, name the formats that matter for that picture, name who allocates each one, and put their decision date in the plan rather than yours. Then read those holders’ investor communications on a standing basis: this allocation was confirmed in an investor presentation and reported by two outlets the same day, and it still reached most people as a January rumor.
- What it costs
- A couple of hours per date to build the first version, and an hour a quarter to keep it current. The real cost is committing to a format conversation before you have footage you are proud of, which is uncomfortable and is the whole point.
- How you’ll know
- You will know at the next collision. If a competing title takes a format window on one of your dates and your team hears about it from a trade story rather than from your own calendar, the window closed before the question reached you.
Built on the ADMADS Engine: sourced, dated evidence, with its limits stated. How these pieces are evidenced.
Your next date on the board already has a screen decision attached to it.
Pick one date you are holding eighteen months out. We work out which scarce allocations sit behind it and when each one actually closes, so the question reaches you while you can still answer it.
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