The top 10 Trek movies by ticket sales!

As we know, inflation is a decent but inadequate measure of comparative movie box office over time, and ticket sales are said to be a much more accurate comparison. The problem was that figures for worldwide ticket sales were not easily available, and conversions were generally only available for the US domestic grosses.

A few years ago I finally found figures for worldwide ticket prices to average out the ticket sales and this is what I came up with: The most accurate comparison ever made of franchise ticket sales!

As we can see, STTMP was riding the coattails of Star Wars (and often confused as such internationally) and did very well. 3 of 4 of the movies based on hard ticket sales were the Kelvin movie series, the most popular Trek movies of all.

The biggest difference is the growth of the international market. With Trek exploding on Netflix and Amazon streaming, and available almost instantly in roughly 200 countries simultaneously, Trek has never been more present, viewed and popular in international markets. I expect a new Trek film to do even better in these markets

RAMA

 

Why was TVH thought to be so successful when it sold less tickets than TMP or even WOK?

 

Looks good. That's quite a drop for Beyond though, I see why they were so reluctant to make a 4th movie.

 

And yet it blows the doors off of a movie (STFC) thought to be ultra-successful.

They were never reluctant to make a movie, it was even announced BEFORE Beyond came out. Afterward, it took a while but then a female director was attached to the project. It has since morphed into the Hawley project. In the meantime, they actually have a script form an award winner for the 5th? movie project...which is probably the more unlikely project.

Studio instability was more responsible for delays rather than the performance of Beyond, Beyond was the studio's biggest grosser of 2016.

While ViacomCBS is now going through more instability as it transitions, Paramount movies actually made a profit in 2019. I think this and foreign money still make the 4th movie (even if recast) a good probability, along with the fact the studio touts it in every margin call and announcement.

RAMA

 

It was successful! It grossed more in dollars but the avg ticket prices even 4 years earlier were lower.

 

Still it's odd that they lost half the audience from TMP to WOK, and WOK is thought to be the best by most people

 

It was the cheapest to make, so it likely made the most profit vs. expenditure. Like how Joker was "the most profitable comic book movie of all time" because although it made less than Avengers Endgame and was seen by far fewer people, it cost a mere $40 million to make instead of $350 million or whatever.

 

And that's one of the main problems beyond faced, given what it cost to make.

 

In December of 1979, in terms of fantasy and science fiction, TMP was up against nothing.

In June of 1982, TWoK was up against ET The Extra-terrestrial, The Thing, Blade Runner, Poltergeist.

That had to of had an effect on box office.

 

While it had two weeks head start, TMP was up against Disney's The Black Hole for the majority of the holiday season in 1979. Still not as much competition as June 1982, but I recall that for my elementary school class I was the only kid with an interest in TMP, everyone else wanted to see The Black Hole.

 

Yet TMP trounced the black hole at the box office.

 

They should've released Star Trek Into Darkness in 2011, then rolled out Star Trek Beyond in 2013, with as much advertising as they did for the first two new movies. Then Beyond probably would've made about as much money as Into Darkness.

Then they would've had a trilogy, the Star Trek name would've been firmly established in the Big League and it could've had the potential to begin to compete with Marvel or Star Wars, and they could've had Star Trek 4 for the 50th Anniversary in 2016.

The Star Wars brand has been diluted by coming out with a new movie every year from 2015 to 2019. I liked the Sequel Trilogy, even though I'm not really a Star Wars fan, but becoming more commonplace has taken the Event feel out of them.

If the new Star Trek movies were every two years from 2009 to 2013, then switched to every three years afterwards, and they kept up the advertising, a fifth new Star Trek movie in 2019 would've been in the perfect position to take on a weakened Star Wars. Star Trek 5 still wouldn't have made as much money as Star Wars Episode IX, but it could've been close if they'd handled it right.

Bottom line: they botched the marketing of these movies and they took too long to make them. No one's denying the last three movies did better than the first 10 (excluding TMP), but that wasn't the real competition. It wasn't about New Trek vs. Old Trek. It was about Star Trek vs. Star Wars and Marvel.

It's easy to say "look at how much better we did than the Old Trek movies!" Yeah, that's great. But how are you doing against your competition today in the here and now?

I don't think for a second that there won't ever be another Star Trek movie but, when they come back, they need to have budgets that are friendlier to the box-offices they'll make... or we'll be right back here again.

I'm not too concerned about it right now, though. For me, Star Trek on TV is where it's at. On balance, I thought the Kelvin Movies were okay; but Discovery and Picard are what I'm a fan of.

 

I've seen The Black Hole and frankly it's the inferior story. A lot of the pieces are there, but they don't come together.

I think it has a lot more to do with the directions Disney has taken the story, also the new character's they're created, and how they're employed and treated the legacy characters.

Personally I think that a story that brought Luke out of retirement in the second movie and had Rey become his two movie padawan would have been superior to anything that we actually got.

Oh well.

 

2016 was a super soft movie market, one that was only successful for "family" animated films and Marvel movies. In fact, that's basically all that makes money now too. Trek will always be a niche in some way, but I think there's a $500 million movie in it.

RAMA

 

That's still based on a lot of assumptions.

For instance, you can't get even a ballpark number of ticket sales for TMP by using average ticket prices because In its first two weeks of release many theaters had jacked up their ticket prices, sometimes as much as 25%. When it went into broader release about the time that The Black Hole came out the ticket prices were generally more average, but unless you know what percentage of the tickets were sold in which period it totally skews the numbers.

The book The First Star Trek Movie by Sherilyn Connelly closely tracks the premier weeks of the film and the ticket prices.

 

1979 was THE year of space movies.

 

STII:TWoK appeals to Star Trek fans in general. You have to remember when ST:TMP was made and released (in fact it was RUSHED to release because Paramount wanted to capitalize on what I'm about to talk further on) it was at the HEIGHT of "Star Wars" mania where EVERYBODY wanted to see more "Space Action" films and went to see anything with "Space" in it (Hell, even the truly crappy Italian garbage "Star Crash" got major U.S. marketing and a large U.S. release).

My point - ST:TMP drew in many non-Trek fans in the general population. <--- Many of these (plus many Trek fans) thought it was slow/ponderous/didn't really capture the characterizations that made the TV show so loved); so - when STII:TWoK hit theaters, the General public still had the bad taste in it's mouth from ST:TMP and stayed away. Also recall that originally what became the first 4 TOS motion pictures were originally going to be produced as TV films for NBC - to be shown a couple of times a year as they were finished. Like the fact ST:TMP started as the "Star Trek: Phase II" TV series - early in production Paramount decided to back out of the NBC deal produce and release STII:TWoK as a feature film in theaters, and the rest is history.

 

Possibly, but I stand by this as the most accurate representation of the popularity (in ticket sales) over time.

RAMA

 

interesting piece on record opening weekends since 1975 - fun to see Star Trek featuring twice..
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottm...ndiana-jones-avengers-spielberg/#722e1bc21d90
https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5eef8fa44d2cef0006338ebf/960x0.jpg?fit=scale

[Embedded image converted to link. Please do not hotlink pics from sites not registered to you. - M']

 

Which if the studios are smart....and not too greedy they put out lost of movies not just the big budget ones, because the longer the covid//corona virus disrupts things the more people will want distractions. Nothin will beat movies in the theater if only for all of those with home theaters we just cant match the screen scale, audio as well as the group experience.

Nothing can beat watching STtVH in tuscon AZ for me. Az used to be a Star Trek fandom area because of the military basing lost of teck stuff training here.....as well as DLI in monterey California. If you coughed or slurped too loud you were aggressively shushed. I'm h been in college exams that had more noise. It was like every one was trying to absorb the film as well as watch it. Unfortunately even having friends watching parties isn't the same. Watching any of the start trek movies at a base theater was the best thing ever with every seat packed....and the audiences could only be more supportive if it was a Con.

I do think they should look to the british SciFi to see how stories triumph over just Effects anyday. I still remember seeing Blakes 7 broadcast on silicon valley' s PBS and seeing how it was addictive stores with minimal practical effects....and how its still influencing all science fiction today at least as much as all star trek and no one hardly knows it because ti was never released in any USA format.

I trained in CGI graphics and story trumps splashy effects any day for all that they are pretty. Maybe part of the problem is fewere people read text, so the current entertainment style leans to all visual storytelling with less actual story and allowing the actors to act, and not exposition/monologue to a cgi effect thats too perfect and a cheat to how we really see and experience the world.

While small screen Trek is fun, you run into problems like I have. I live in a rural area for heath reasons, while I am 50ft from a T1 fiber line, the only connections for residential is intermittent wifi from cell towers. The infrastructure is just not good enough to handle dedicated online only media outside of cities....and with covid/corona psych studies show its already causing urban flight from cities and even suburbs. I think this trend is going to hold because of the fracturing of society from the virus as well as political dissonance, and social unrest will change the profit ratio as incomes fall as well.

Basicly film/movies are better on the big screen and you can get a bigger profit with teh right marketing and holding the inflated budgets down. We actually don't need to see everything visually, as out brains cannot process information like a camera, its both basic psych and biology. They are wasting their money and I hate its putting my favorite series at risk.