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Monday
11May2009

A Little More Money for 'Star Trek' Over the Weekend

DateMonday, May 11, 2009 at 2:23PM
Last Thursday, I predicted that Star Trek would earn $81 million over its first four days. Most projections had it in the $65 - $70 million range, but I had a hunch it would do significantly better than that. The estimates came out yesterday, and the number was closer to my prediction, around $76 million, but the Sunday numbers pointed to a much bigger drop-off than the evidence would indicate.

So now the official numbers are out, and Star Trek did come much closer to $80 million since its Thursday night debut - $79.2 over the first four days. The rest of the top five was mostly unchanged; none of the films adjusted by more than a couple hundred grand, and that's pretty typical of the official tallies.

The difference for Star Trek was, in fact, those Sunday numbers, which actually only dropped about 22% from Saturday, a really strong hold. To put that in perspective, only two movies from 2008's top ten had smaller drops on the opening Sunday - The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones - and only The Dark Knight did it on a standard non-holiday weekend. So, that means that outside of the biggest anomaly in the last decade, Star Trek outgunned every movie that made over $150 million in 2008 on the slowest box office day of the weekend.

What does that mean? Tons and tons of momentum. The film will be no worse than a strong second place this weekend, and I don't expect a normal 40 - 55% drop in the follow-up weekend. Certainly, it will fare better than Wolverine, which unloaded almost 70% of its crowd and still earned $27 million. Assuming another $15 million or so during the week and another $50 million next weekend, and suddenly, Star Trek is sitting pretty at $145 million in ten days.

The debut of Terminator will hurt significantly, but depending on how good the response is to that sci-fi blockbusters, Trek could bounce back a bit in the two or three weeks after that, still riding on the hype that it's the best movie of the summer so far.

AuthorColin Boyd | | in , | Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment |

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