'Star Trek' Rakes In Over $72M!

Friday saw the release of J.J. Abrams’ new STAR TREK movie. It followed one week after the release of X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, which according to Boxofficemojo.com grossed just north of 85 million dollars domestic. This weekend STAR TREK was able to grab itself a little over 72 million. What does it all mean? Not much. Though Wolvie won the weekend battle, Kirk and Spock were able to do some other things. One for example, they broke THE DARK KNIGHT’s 6.3 million dollar record for an IMAX opening by a full 2 million. They also crushed the openings (even with inflation) of all the previous Trek films. Wolvie doesn’t appear to have the legs to even make a run at X2. And with a 2 week break before TERMINATOR: SALVATION gets released, combined with good word of mouth, I fully expect STAR TREK to have the better totals by the 21st of May.

A big part as to why WOLVERINE won the weekend is the previous X-Men movies were better on average the previous Star Trek movies were. Yes, WRATH OF KAHN is better than X3, but overall I’d rather watch Nightcrawler in X2 than Kirk and McCoy trying to save the whales in the 4th Star Trek movie. Also I think Star Trek carries a stigma that major comic characters like Wolverine don’t. Star Trek seems to be hated on by a lot of people who have never actually seen it. Or those who have decided you have to pick between Kirk and Han Solo. Overall though, no genre gets hated on more than Sci-Fi…well except maybe musicals.

So, last weekend, on May 1st, I got excited, grabbed a few friends and saw WOLVERINE, once. Since 3:30 on May 8th however, I’ve seen STAR TREK 3 times. That is because I believe STAR TREK was at least 3 times better than WOLVERINE.

Based on projected Box Office numbers alone, both movies have already implied sequels are to come. For me, Wolvie will really have to step up his game to make up for a movie that I think fell somewhere in the realm of “Better than SPIDERMAN 3, but still not even as good as a crappy X3”. STAR TREK on the other hand pulled out some BACK TO THE FUTURE style changes that now make it possible to go in pretty much any direction desired in the subsequent films to follow.p