What started out as a normal award season buzz for Marty Supreme from A24 ended up being one of the most popular events of the year for the Marty Supreme team and the film industry in general. At a fully attended Q&A session held at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on the evening of Wednesday, January 14th, 2026, things took an unexpected turn as moderator Robert Downey Jr. made a surprising revelation to the shocked gathering.
Whereas this had been the platform for the critical success of Timothée Chalamet’s performance in the ping pong drama produced by the Safdie brothers, it instead became the location for this surprise announcement, which mixed together elements of prestige cinema, spectacle of the Marvel brand, and sci-fi heritage in an attention-grabbing way.
The ‘Dunesday’ bombshell
Just when he was hitting his stride in his discussion, he derailed it by bringing up Dunesday, so to speak. This is in relation to an impending box office battle set to happen on December 18, 2026. The battle is between:
The third edition of Dune will be distributed by Warner Bros. & Legendary. The upcoming Disney and Marvel release, Avengers: Doomsday, features Downey Jr.’s return in the series with a new character, Doctor Doom. Smiling at his applauding audience, Downey said:
“We’re thinking Dunesday. We’ll see if we’re still friends by then.”
The comment, which was aimed at Chalamet for being in Dune: Part Three, immediately went viral, thus starting the biggest box office clash since the occurrence of Barbenheimer. But while the ‘Dunesday’ news was hitting the headlines, there was another part of the Q&A that showed an astonishing insight into the level of enthusiasm that Chalamet has for Marty Supreme. In a candid talk with Downey, he opened up on the fact that there was one particular scene that could have ended in disaster.
In one of the most intense scenes shot in a motel, Chalamet has revealed that he purposely tried to push a background extra hard enough for the camera to capture a realistic effect, but found himself in a situation that was all too real. The Warning: The actor broke character to tell him he had just served 30 years in prison and said, “You don’t want to see me angry.” So, Chalamet turned to director Josh Safdie and asked him directly, “Who do you have me opposite, man?”
However, just when the session was about to conclude, Downey Jr. turned around from pitchman to coach, doled out some hard-to-find praise for Chalamet that had the potential to be “I’m looking at one of the greats of our time. This performance—it’s not just discipline, it’s soul. He’s doing things with a paddle that I couldn’t do with a suit of armor.”
This elicited a round of applause and social media talk of a changing of the guard between two of the most bankable stars in the industry. With a joke and impeccable timing, Robert Downey Jr. managed to turn a movie Q&A into an unofficial announcement of the biggest box office showdown of the decade. A showdown of Dune vs. Avengers. Timothée vs. Downey. A showdown of prestige sci-fi films versus superhero blockbusters. It appears that December 18, 2026, Dunesday, could potentially go down in history as one of the most pivotal days in cinematic history, just like Barbenheimer.
