Ack! Please don't bring up Joe the Plumber - I
am Joe Public and prefer to remain so

.
As for the 'biggest year' - no ... this isn't a leap year, and even if it were, it would be no bigger than any other leap year in Trek's history

.
I certainly don't expect
Iron Man numbers from AbramsTrek - don't forget that that movie had Robert Downey Jr., who is still something of a media darling and also a subject of intense and often morbid interest - people either want to see how far he has fallen lately, or how far he has climbed since the last fall. Thankfully, he has climbed high enough to matter again. And whether the subject is a relative unknown or not,
Iron Man easily had the best trailer in years (plug for The Onion here, too, who brilliantly captured the phenomenon in their video "
Wildly Popular Iron Man Trailer to be Adapted into Full-Length Motion Picture"). Frankly, I don't think the
Trek trailers have had that sort of impact, and when it comes right down to it, it's
Trek.
We may love it, but the general public think it's a bit silly, right or wrong, and nothing I've seen in the trailers or the stills seems to make that any less likely. So far, the teaser was intriguing, but the trailer makes it all look rather daft - especially the silly bits with
all of the characters; if Paramount want
Trek to appeal to a broader audience, other than the Vince Vaughn/Will Farrell crowd of slapstick humor, they're going to need something a lot better than what they've done so far. C'mon, Karl Urban's McCoy and Simon Pegg's Scotty
both come across as nutballs, and Quinto's Spock looks, in a word, stupid. And the Empire cover makes the characters look like every slash fan's wet dream - I'm not sure that's going to bring in the bucks from the general public - or even the diehard core of fans.
As much as I love
Trek, I think Paramount need to cut their losses and forget about it ever being a solid film franchise again, at least not until they give up the fiction that they can "reboot it without rebooting it"; it can't serve the two masters of canon and reconception, no matter how clever Abrams and his
Transformers hacks think they are. Rip the Band-Aid off the wound, throw away the canon and start with a clean slate, or commit to telling a good,
new story within it -
not a damned 'prequel!' - nothing else will ever do the job, certainly not something like AbramsTrek, with the sort of compromises they expect from the
audience in order to tell 'their' story.