Foreign numbers VERY Dissapointing.

Where are the Japan numbers?

We have lots of potential for gains in places like Brazil, Taiwan and France, large enough countries to impact BO numbers. We did great in Germany, Sweden, UK, NZ and Oz. Improving the Latin country's aareness of Trek seems like another good move.

If you gotta have a big star, Tom Hanks at least loves Trek, and he's versatile. You have to ask though, would his considerable salary be made up at foreign BO? This assumes someone like that would get their approximate going rate for a co-starring role. After the $$ XI made I doubt any major star - even a huge fanboy like Hanks - would be aboard for pennies on the dollar. While XI had a wonderful cast, it wasn't an expensive cast.

 

If asked to take a pay cut just to put on a Starfleet uniform perhaps an Admirals at that, I have a feeling Hanks would do it.

Also Canada's numbers are pretty strong for Trek, they only have just under 34 million people. I would say that ratio is really good even the best.
The UK has around 62 million and it did about 35 million with Trek

 

I think the important deltas are absolute dollars, not % gain. An extra $2 million from Venezuela would mean a lot more than an extra $170,000 from Egypt, but this ranking doesn't really get at that. Brazil, Mexico, France and Spain seem to have the largest absolute deltas and could have boosted Trek's worldwide total by around $30 million if it had done as well in those territories as Wolverine. The grosses from the Latin countries are so small for both that I really don't see their importance.

The % gain would be a useful measure of where Paramount needs to do better, perhaps, if we combined it with a minimum total gross (as a screening factor) assuming the comparison to Wolverine is the right one.

 

Star Trek made $5.8 million. Wolverine hasn't opened there yet (it opens in September), but should make somewhere at least $10 million based on the trends of the previous X-Men films. X3 made $13 million and it was also released 4 months after the US release.

 

Yes and let me tell you that for the first time I saw some Star Trek Publicity but it was mostly on a few billboards (pretty small ones I might add) and nothing else, not even on TV. Wolverine had twice as much... In fact I'm impressed that Star Trek made 500 thousand in Venezuela considering the almost non existent publicity it had. Everyone seemed to enjoy the movie in the cinemas (most of them were old people! wtf?!) and I can imagine it would have done a lot better it were better advertised. Transformers 2 still has a lot of publicity here, its overkill and its making good business, if they treated star trek with the interest!

Check it out... small country with a commie president, but still:
1 1 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs $4,137,811
2 2 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen $3,097,955
3 3 Up $6,484,313

 

It was in the top ten movies in the Australian box office over here for over a month. I saw it twice. But still, I'm not sure why people here think a guy in a superhero costume is cool, but guys in space are not. What's the diff?

 

I've converted the Canadian totals to American $ (using today's exchange rate), and subtracted them out of the North American total to get separate #s for the US and Canada, then taken 13 of the biggest markets, and calculated their per capita box office contribution to Trek, using population figures from Wikipedia.

Here is the per capita contribution (in US dollars) to Star Trek's box office for 13 of the biggest markets (i.e., the average American contributed 75.2 cents, the average Canadian 66.2 cents, etc.):

USA $0.752
Canada 0.662
Australia 0.579
UK 0.557
Germany 0.156
South Korea 0.118
France 0.107
Spain 0.087
Italy 0.052
Japan 0.045
Mexico 0.032
Russia 0.029
Brazil 0.010

Of course, one could make the case that that's not a fair way to compare, as richer countries have more money to spend on movies and higher ticket prices. So maybe it makes more sense to calculate the fraction of country's total GDP that went to Star Trek movie tickets. I'm using 2008 GDPs, taken from the IMF via Wikipedia, though the movie was released in 2009, so this won't be exact. But this is roughly the parts per million of each country's GDP that have gone to movie ticket sales for Star Trek this year:

USA 16.18
Canada 14.78
UK 12.83
Australia 12.52
South Korea 6.00
Germany 3.48
Mexico 3.12
Spain 2.47
Russia 2.46
France 2.43
Italy 1.35
Brazil 1.21
Japan 1.18

Obviously, that's a heck of a dropoff between the English speaking countries and everyone else. Of course, there's a similar discrepancy for virtually every American movie as (duh) English speaking people are more likely to watch movies that are in English, but the gap seems to be unusually large with Star Trek.

As I've speculated in other threads, I'm wondering if it's largely due to American TV shows (or at least American TV shows from the 60s and 70s) not getting as widely broadcast in the non-English speaking world as American *movies* are today. That puts any movie based on an American TV show from decades ago at a disadvantage relative to something original, or something based on a franchise that's more recent.

 

Love your calculations, but you have way too much time on your hands!

I think that's exactly it. I forget who but one of the posters from Germany said that most people there dismiss Trek as a kids show because the only series that was shown was TOS and it was put at in a kid's show time-slot. So no-one is interested in the movies.

The bad image or non image Trek has around the world needs to be counteracted - hopefully the DVD will help that - with loads of clips being shown on TV or available on the internet. Clips like the Kelvin sequence, the Gaila sequence, the sky-diving stuff - everything that will show this is no kid's movie

 

I was right Canada is the biggest supporter of Trek next to the US.
Thanks for those detailed stats. It would be interesting to see when a movie failed in Canada but was a huge success in the US. Because I am thinking the cultures are so close that usually if it's a success in the US market it would be in Canada too, that's why the domestic market always includes Canada.

 

Night at the Museum 2 is an example of a movie doing far worse in Canada than the US. Per capita, it only did about half as well in Canada as the US.

 

I didn´t only mean South America with "the Latin world", but also countries where they speak French, Italian and Spanish outside South America.

 

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

Domestic: $255,672,245 34.2% + Foreign: $493,000,000 65.8% = Worldwide: $748,672,245

Now this illustrates my disappointment very clearly

 

my Brazilian friends told me the film wasn't mentioned in ANY advertising of any kind..
it showed in few theaters with NO advance advertising..

TOS is currently being shown in Brazil translated into Portuguese..WTF was Paramount smoking..all of those friends in Brazil every single one could tell me that Wolverine had been released..


Paramount didn't give this movie the true worldwide publicity it deserved..

so as far as South and Central America has been concerned, it was a flop..

 

Star Trek was never going to do Harry Potter numbers. If you maintain ridiculous expectations, you're going to be disappointed quite a lot.

 

This just goes to show you little you understand about Foreign Box Office numbers.

 

I know that.

But the percentages are wacked for both movies, look at the massive differences on the percentages, never mind the dollar amount.

When I look at that, is it REALLY too much to desire and want a 50/50 split???

How is THAT unreasonable, comparatively?

 

This illustrates what we have already discussed Paramount minimized Star Treks potential in foreign markets, which cost it dearly, but it seems they didn't really care that much.

Guys we are all very happy and pleased with the domestic why wouldn't we be, it's awesome.

My concern is ONLY with the foreign numbers and how Paramount dropped the ball because it never thought it was worth it, and maybe they were right, the advertising dollars perhaps could never jusify the ROI. I guess we will never know. However it will be interesting to see how much better the next one does in the foreign market.

I will once again be disappointed if the gap between the percentages doesn't close up better than XI on the next one XII.