Regal Cinemas has put opening-night tickets for Dune: Part Three on sale ahead of the film’s Dec. 18 premiere, and the price for one premium seat is $50. Some opening weekend IMAX 70mm screenings reportedly sold out within minutes, a sign that moviegoers are still willing to pay up for the right format.
The number matters because premium screens are no longer a side business. Premium format theaters such as IMAX and 4DX accounted for 17% of ticket sales in 2025, up from 13% in 2021, even as the average regular movie ticket price sat at $12.75 and a premium ticket averaged $18 nationally. In bigger cities, those tickets can run as high as $30, and AMC said it had 517 premium-format theaters at the end of 2025, up 30% since 2021.
The push comes as theaters search for ways to make up for a smaller slate of movies and a thinner audience. Movie ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada fell from more than 1.2 billion in 2019 to 769.2 million in 2025, and theater executives have said there were 25% fewer films available for multiplexes, complicating both pricing and investment decisions. At the same time, spending on concessions and merchandise has grown 220% over the last 20 years, a shift that has changed what a night at the movies can mean for the bottom line.
AMC has been especially direct about the tradeoff. The company says ticket holders spend $9 on average at the concession stand, up from $5 before the pandemic, and its chief executive, Adam Aron, has argued that theaters are making “more money per patron than we made prior to Covid.” AMC also adds a surcharge of up to $2 a ticket for popular films on opening weekends, another sign that exhibitors are borrowing pricing habits from airlines and hotels to target fans willing to pay for the premium experience.
The tension for theaters is straightforward: premium pricing works when the movie is big enough to fill the room, but it is harder to justify when the pipeline is thinner and the audience is still smaller than it was before the pandemic. Greg Marcus has said, “Give us enough films,” and added, “If you're not going to let us earn a decent return, don't ask me to invest more or cut my prices.” For Regal and its rivals, Dune: Part Three is now a test of whether a marquee title can keep those higher prices moving from one opening weekend into the next.