From Box Office Guru on Twitter:
#StarTrek up about 25% SAT. Good jump from a non-opening day FRI. WED-FRI may end up w/$82-85M. Official studio est to come.
That's some very good news and bodes well for Into Darkness to have a slightly longer shelf life than your average tentpole franchise summer blockbuster. Weekday numbers this week should give us a good indication of what's going to happen over the next few weeks and how Into Darkness will fare versus some upcoming releases.
I know people were in full fledged panic over these numbers but there are a couple of factors to bear in mind and some realities people need to understand:
1) Star Trek 2009 was the beneficiary of a very friendly release schedule. The film faced very little, if any, competition in May 2009. The two biggest holdovers which Trek faced its opening weekend were "Obsessed" starring Beyonce, and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" which underperformed at the box office. The following week saw the much anticipated release of "Angels & Demons," the sequel to the "Da Vinci Code." However A&D was blasted in reviews and the film managed to make a little over half of the originals release. On the 22nd of May Trek faced off against "Night at the Museum 2" and "Terminator Salvation" and performed extremely well making $22 million over the weekend, down a mere 46% from the week before. Star Trek 2009 pretty much coasted through the month with little resistance until the beginning of June with the release of the original Hangover.
Contrast that with Into Darkness which has had to contend with two major holdovers in "Iron Man 3" and "The Great Gatsby," both films which eat into key demographics. Star Trek 2009 performed very well with women and had a larger female audience percentage than previous Trek films, and that percentage is hurt by the overperformance of Gatsby, which a number of analyst projected would fail at the box office... it didn't. Additionally, Iron Man 3 has had a very strong run and its numbers are holding up extremely well, so again another demographic is being eaten away. Add to that next weekend Into Darkness faces "Fast and Furious 6" and "Hangover III," both extremely popular film franchises.
Ultimately what will keep Star Trek going is word of mouth and fortunately WOM has been great with the film scoring a Cinemascore grade of "A" with audiences. So these next few days and next weekend will be very telling. Frankly, I think the film will do just fine and probably end up in the same ballpark as Trek 2009. However, where the film is really performing well is overseas and I suspect if Into Darkness' domestic numbers come up short of Trek 2009's, the international numbers will more than make up for that slack.
2) I honestly think the max a Star Trek film can make is in the neighborhood of $250-270 million domestically. Star Trek is a very popular franchise, but it simply doesn't have as big a movie fanbase as Harry Potter, Star Wars, Transformers, or the Dark Knight, and I think to expect it to perform like those franchises is very shortsighted on Paramount's part.
So Paramount needs to decide how they intend to proceed. Do they continue to make films with budgets around $150-190 million, but accept the fact the film will gross a total $400 million plus worldwide, or do they maybe scale back a bit? Still make big Star Trek films, but try to budget around $125-135 million and hope for similar numbers. There's simply no way to go back to the days of the Next Generation films trying to make Trek films with $60-80 million budgets.
Yancy
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