Box Office: Star Trek Goes Where No Trek Movie Has Gone Before

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 10, 2009

rr-startrek

There may be some Trekkies out there who are disappointed that the weekend domestic box office for Star Trek was only $72.5 million. I say quit grouching. This is still the best showing ever for a Star Trek movie and a lot better than what they had been predicting a few weeks before, when the tracking indicated a $50 million opening.

I know there were some people out there who had been predicting and hoping for as high as $90 to $100 million for this flick, but $72.5 million is a very strong finish. When you add in the Thursday night sneak preview numbers, it’s a four-day haul of $76.5 million. The per-theater average for the weekend was $18,836. I say when you open to those kind of numbers you are doing all right.

It’s also a record. The opening shatters the $30.7 weekend domestic box office record for the Star Trek franchise, set by Star Trek: First Contact in 1996. Needless to say, Trek is more popular now than ever before. So you can still roll out all those cliches about how the J.J. Abrams prequel “boldly goes where no Star Trek movie has gone before” — because it has.

The other big story of the weekend was the massive drop of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which fell from an $85 million haul to $27 million in just one single week. That’s a 68 percent drop. Why am I not surprised?? I had expected Wolverine to open big and then wilt in the following weeks, but I didn’t expect numbers this bad. In fact, the numbers this weekend came in a little bit softer than I expected for most of these movies. Next Day Air only brought in $4 million, also less than I expected. Yet the ticket sales are still up 16 percent for the year, and the numbers still hold up well compared to the second weekend of May from last year. That, may I remind you, was the infamous Speed Racer crash-and-burn weekend when it was clobbered by Iron Man. I don’t need to say any more about it.

In any event I have always thought that Star Trek would open weaker than Wolverine, but would do great repeat business and not suffer the kind of steep drops other genre movies typically suffer. Already, this 11th Star Trek movie has been a commercial and artistic success on a number of levels (95 percent at Rotten Tomatoes) and I expect good things for Star Trek for several weeks to come, just based on the level of enthusiasm I hear for the flick.

The weekend numbers from the Friday-Sunday period are as follows:

Star Trek – $72,500,000
X-Men Origins: Wolverine – $27,000,000
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – $10,450,000
Obsessed – $6,600,000
17 Again – $4,405,000
Next Day Air – $4,000,000
The Soloist – $3,605,000
Monsters vs. Aliens – $3,379,000
Earth (2009) – $2,488,000
Hannah Montana The Movie – $2,414,000

I just want to wish you folks a Happy Mother’s Day and urge you to stay tuned later this week here at the Reject Report as we preview the sequel to The Da Vinci Code entitled Angels and Demons. That ought to also be a big hit in the Religious States of America.

Until then, live long and prosper. (I know, I know — enough with the Star Trek catch phrases, already.)