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Space — the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Yes, the weekend that all Trekkies have been waiting for — ever since this flick was moved back to the summer from last winter — is finally here. Star Trek opens and will no doubt be the number one movie at the box office this weekend. In fact, its opening is sooner than a lot of people think, on Thursday night with 7 pm screenings happening in a reported 3,800 theaters. So it promises to be a very big weekend indeed for science fiction fans.

I’ll have plenty to say about that, but I’ll start off first by getting out of the way my thoughts about this weekend’s cinematic roadkill, Next Day Air. It’s opening up in just over a thousand theaters, so it doesn’t stand much of a chance of making too much money for that reason alone.

Next Day Air stars Donald Faison and Mos Def as two couriers who deliver a package to the wrong apartment, and Mike Epps and Wood Harris play two hoods who open it up and find it’s loaded with cocaine. They think they’ve hit the jackpot with this find, and of course that triggers all sorts of mayhem. Cisco Reyes and Debbie Allen also star.

As I have said many times before, it really does seem like it’s a feast or famine time at the theaters at the moment. Either you’ve got a big hit or you’re finished. Somebody’s got to lose, and Next Day Air is likely to be this weekend’s box office loser with a haul of $6 million.

Now onto Star Trek, which is the J.J. Abrams reimagining of the original Gene Roddenberry series that ran from 1966 to 1969, complete with the original Trek characters we all know and love: Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhuru, Sulu and Chekov. This one features Chris Pine as Kirk and we see him growing up in his wild youth phase, We also see how the whole gang ends up on the Enterprise and how they come together to save the world. Fun stuff. Zachary Quinto plays Spock, Karl Urban is McCoy, and Zoe Saldana, John Cho, Anton Yelchin and Simon Pegg (as Scotty) round out the crew. Eric Bana, Bruce Greenwood and Winona Ryder are also in the cast.

The buzz for this movie so far has been excellent, and as a result people’s expectations have been raised for how the movie will do. A few weeks back people were predicting only around $50 million, but the theater count has gone way up since then and the tracking is through the roof. I’ve heard stories of between $80 to $100 million, but a lot of people are a lot more cautious. Keep in mind Star Trek has always been more a “cult” phenomenon than anything else over the years, so that’s why people are a little hesitant about saying this will be a blockbuster.

Me, I will stick to my original thoughts about how this will do. I’ve always thought that Star Trek‘s opening would be lower than X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but that the holdover business would be better and that would result in a higher overall gross in the end. So for the Friday-to-Sunday period, I say it comes in at $79 million. If you also count Thursday night, I’d say $87 million. The thing is that I really don’t know if that 3,800 figure is accurate for the Thursday night showings. If that really is how many theaters are screening Star Trek on Thursday — wow. We could be in for some big freaking numbers.

If these weekend figures hold up as predicted this will be the biggest Star Trek box office opening of all time. (It better be, because the budget was something like $150 million.) The biggest opening ever was Star Trek: First Contact in 1996 at $30.7 million, so that will not be too hard to beat at all. I’m already hearing reports of sellouts everywhere. This movie is going to be BIG.

My three day weekend prediction is as follows:

1. Star Trek $79 million
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine $33 million
3. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past $8.7 million
4. Obsessed $6.5 million
5. Next Day Air $6 million
6. Monsters vs. Aliens $4 million
7. 17 Again $3.8 million
8. The Soloist $3.3 million
9. Earth $2.8 million
10. Hannah Montana: The Movie $2.6 million

And that’s it. See you at weekend’s end when we beam up the final totals from the box office here again at The Reject Report.