STID "tracking" for $85-90 million opening [U.S. box office]

And?
If they had read in the tea-leaves that it will make 75 million, you'd now declare the film a brilliant success?

 

This does touch on what's the real issue here: the opening weekend failed some overreaching last minute expectations. That's not the same thing at all as it having missed an important financial target indicating that it's not successful and isn't already doing very well for the studio.

Two weeks ago, when the expectations were at around 80 to 85 million dollars, no one at Paramount was sweating bullets about that fact.

 

Why are you trying to pin every part of this conversation into such extremes? Some things I've pointed out about the film's performance have been negative, while others have been positive. I think another sequel is assured.

The film opened below Paramount's pre-release expectations. Domestic box office will likely drop from the first film and be at least somewhat disappointing to Paramount, but foreign box office is showing good growth. None of these should be seen as controversial statements.

 

In fact. Why not?

The trek ensamble could have some update and expansion. chekov was the ruskie that showed token tolerance. We need a Robau type (middle eastern or Indian subcontinent) security chief and maybe another female character. Even borrow some from the star trek pitch.

 

Perhaps you were not around, but in a year where E.T., Rocky III, Poltergiest and other films made a splash, TWOK was well remembered at year's end. Paramount was more than pleased, unlike now, where nuTrek2 is not meeting studio debut expectations.

Few even care about nuTrek. Who is considering this film as a "must see" anything?

 

TWOK was also notable for having the largest opening weekend gross of any film up to that point ($14.3 million) and of any film that year, 1982 -- even E.T. which went on to become the highest grossing film of all time (until Jurassic Park dethroned it). At the average price of $2.94 a ticket, TWOK sold approximately 4.9 million tickets that weekend at only 1,621 theaters. Remember that there were far fewer multiplexes in 1982.* That's an average of about 3,000 people watching TWOK at each theater from June 4th-June 6th, 1982.

STID is looking at a $70.6 million opening weekend. At an average ticket price of $7.94, that's 8.9 million tickets sold at 3,868 theaters on an estimated 10,100 screens. That's 2.4 times the number of theaters, yet it only sold 1.8 times the number of tickets as TWOK did in 1982. That's 2,300 people watching STID at each theater from May 17th-19th, 2013.

* I have no idea how many movie screens TWOK was on in 1982, but there were less than 20,000 indoor screens back then in the U.S. and today there are approximately 40,000.

 

Perhaps I was very much around, an adult, and remember it all quite clearly. Nice try, anyway.

No one but trekkies considered TWOK a "must see" then. People now like to quote Pauline Kael's review lauding it, pretending that it was representative of critical reaction to the movie; it wasn't.

 

Yes--meanwhile, nuTrek2 is already a deflated life raft compared to a film based on a 50-year old Marvel character who spent most of his decades being a B-list character at best.

 

Plenty of people care about it and regard it as a must see. Whether quite enough people see it to fully justify the bigger budget remains to be seen once the worldwide gross has finished rolling in.

 

Nope, sorry. 168 million dollars in a week is - what, twice TWOK's entire first-run gross? Go ahead, adjust for inflation, turn it inside out and upside down and it still knocks oldTrek flat.

 

It's taken a long time for comic books to get rid of the stigma, especially with so many duds over the years.

 

Then why did it set the record for the biggest opening weekend of all time in 1982?

 

The first four Trek films were home run hits in the domestic market, but only delivered meagre results in foreign box office (although TMP actually did pretty well abroad - it was more the sequels that dropped off in that regard). The sixth, seventh and eighth Trek films were solid successes, delivering good grosses for their relatively modest budgets, but foreign box office still lagged. Star Trek in 2009 was the first Trek film since the 1980s to be a Top 10 domestic hit for the year and it was the first step towards decent foreign grosses. STiD looks to slip somewhat domestically, while continuing to make big improvements in foreign box office.

 

http://trekmovie.com/2013/05/18/into-darkness-headed-to-70m-domestic-open-weekend-75m-international/

 

I really wonder how Trek might've done as a franchise had we got TWOK as the opening movie and not TMP...

 

Yep. That's the long and the short of it.

Folks running around getting upset over a "magic number" that only came up a week or so ago are pretty much flunking the exercise.

 

For all of the mixed reactions to it, TMP was a huge hit. In adjusted terms its the second highest grossing Trek movie, behind 2009's Star Trek.

 

We still need to check this weeks and next weekends box office to better estimate how much will the movie make. If the movie has legs we will all be more than fine.

 

That's a detail some must forget in order to erase the actual effect of TWOK, how that film certainly pleased the studio, and had audiences wanting to see more--even with so much competition in theatres.

Where is the buzz about nuTrek2? People are interested in Iron Man, and where the plots will take the character, but nuTrek?

 

Don't expect too much from next week with two huge movies coming out, my gut says Hangover might suffer.