The STAR TREK Movies, As Ranked By STAR TREK Con-Goers

[Opus]

Trek Box Office debate again - The Circle of Life...

... or The 5th Circle of Hell. Either one.

Anywho...

You can't compare TMP to STiD. Different time, different options for entertainment. What brought people to theaters 30+ years ago (can only see it in the movies for a few months and will be on broadcast TV in 3 years) is no longer the case. STiD is available for Digital Download TODAY. The DVD comes in a few weeks. It will be on DirecTV and Netflix. People know if they miss it in the theater that they can catch it at home. With home theater being what it is, it most likely the better experience and the cheaper and more preferred option.

Or something...

 

[Maxwell Everett]

Maxwell, I was just considering that the other day, but had no idea how to calculate the price inflation or box office numbers to account for the differences in our currency's value from the earlier productions to the new ones. How did you calculate these numbers?

Oftentimes these newer productions are labeled as "vastly more successful" because of a monetary number without considering that the dollar bought a hell of a lot more 50+ years ago. I always thought that might be a fallacy of sorts but didn't know how to go about proving it.

Sure. Here are the wordwide grosses, the average ticket prices and the links where I got the info:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture: $139,000,000 gross @ $2.51 average ticket price
Star Trek Into Darkness: $453,744,180 gross @ $8.16 average ticket price

Without getting into incongruencies with reality and other esoteric horseshit, I still gotta interject that the 139 figure for TMP is WAY WAY less than everybody claimed in the early 80s, when the 175 mil worldwide gross figure was bandied about rather handily.

And if you consider that is back when paramount was TRYING to hide big numbers to avoid paying out net points (something they managed to do up until 1985 or 1986), that they'd let the 175mil stand in STARLOG and pretty much any other mag I saw the number in, I'd figure that is the low-end number.

So how it got downgraded to 139 I really don't know. 139 is actually in keeping with what the domestic total should have been, if you figure about a 2.5X multiplier on the film's rentals, which is how it was reported in VARIETY (the general idea is that 2.5 times rental equals gross -- that was also rather commonly reported back then, along with the gross 2.5 times budget to breakeven as a general principle.) TMP generated 39 mil in rentals just in 79, and a total of I believe 55 mil overall theatrical. 137.5 goes into 55 how many times? 2.5

You can look at Gerrold's old column in STARLOG where as I recall he runs figures much like these proving TMP was well into the green (I think this would have been in 1981 or early 1982.)

All this just makes TMP seem more platinum than golden with respect to current earnings of recent films when inflation and common sense are factored in.

All great information. Thank you for that!