Three Presales, Three Outages: AMC Approves $2m in IT Spend After Dune Crush

Presales for Dune: Part Three opened on Tuesday, roughly four months before the film arrives, and theater chain apps answered with apparent outages and long virtual queues ^[1][2]. AMC chief executive Adam Aron wrote on X that traffic to the company's website and mobile app was about triple the volume it saw for the latest Spider-Man installment, said "We thought we were ready, but we weren't," and announced that $2 million in IT costs had been approved to "fully address the issue" ^[7][8][9].

This was the third scramble of its kind in a few weeks, following presales for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and Destin Daniel Cretton's Spider-Man: Brand New Day ^[3]. In Manhattan, buyers who had given up on the apps queued around the block at AMC Lincoln Square hours before the box office opened ^[4].

The operational problem here is not surprise demand. It is scheduled demand. An onsale is a date the exhibitor picks, announced in advance, for a title everyone already knows is oversubscribed. That produces the worst possible traffic shape: a near-vertical spike a handful of times a year against a baseline that is otherwise ordinary. Aron's own comparison is the tell. If Spider-Man set the capacity plan and Dune came in at three times that, the plan was calibrated to the last incident rather than to a trend that had already produced two incidents ^[7][3].

Scarcity is doing the rest of the work. Demand has concentrated on IMAX, and on IMAX 70mm in particular, a format only 25 theaters in the US can show ^[5]. That is under 1.4 percent of the more than 1,800 IMAX locations worldwide ^[12][19]. When inventory is that thin, every buyer has an incentive to hit the store in the first minute, and resellers have tried to auction seats for hundreds of dollars ^[6]. Supply relief is slow: IMAX chief executive Rich Gelfond said in a quarterly update earlier this year that he sees potential to double the footprint, but that depends on exhibitors investing in venues and on auditoriums large enough to house the screens ^[13][14]. IMAX, which is not involved in ticket sales, declined to comment on the record ^[11].

Fandango and Regal Cinemas also drew complaints and did not immediately return requests for comment ^[10]. AMC directed WIRED to Aron's posts, in which he called the demand "a high-class problem" and the outcome "intolerable and inexcusable" ^[15][8].

The churn risk is the point critics are making. Barry Hertz, film editor at The Globe and Mail, posted that if ticket buying becomes a competitive sport, vendors need the tech and UX to support it, and told WIRED that "eventizing" films looks like a lifeline for theaters but cannot come with added technical frustration ^[16][17]. Simone Cromer, previously known for Timothee Chalamet fan accounts, wrote that she is done trying to be first and will see it on a regular screen later in the week ^[18]. That is the expensive outcome: a premium-format buyer converting to a standard-format buyer.

What to watch: whether AMC's $2 million lands before the next tentpole onsale rather than after it, and what it actually buys, given Aron framed it as IT costs and not a queue redesign ^[9]; whether any chain moves to staggered or lottery onsales instead of a single opening minute; and whether Fandango or Regal say anything at all ^[10].