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Wednesday
20May2009

Our Revised 'Star Trek' Box Office Total: $257 Million

DateWednesday, May 20, 2009 at 4:02PM
Star Trek narrowly missed out on being the first repeat box office champion of the summer, coming up about three million dollars short of Angels & Demons in the official weekend tally. The J.J. Abrams reboot actually won Saturday and Sunday, but couldn't overcome a stronger Friday night opening for the return of Robert Langdon.

We updated the financials for Trek around this time last week, and now we're prepared to give our official final box office figure for the film. We did this last year after The Dark Knight was in theaters for ten days, and we arrived at $535 million, which was less than one percent off the total amount the film made. I'm not saying that'll be accurate this time - in fact, it probably won't be - but using a few guidelines, we can find a good number we're comfortable with.

Here's what we did: Because the movie has performed quite well every day, only losing big chunks of the audience going from Sunday to Monday, we estimated a 40% slip each week in attendance. Some weeks might show a 50% drop or more when the number of theaters is scaled back, but in other weeks, the losses will be less than 40%. It's a nice round figure that over the life of a movie is fairly reliable.

The weekday numbers were really good last week, and this Monday was - gasp - 40% less than last Monday. So we're using a 40% mark to calculate those figures, too, keeping Monday - Thursday audience separate from Friday - Sunday totals. We cut off our cipherin' at 13 weeks. That's three months plus one week, roughly the DVD release date for major motion pictures these days. There are some movies in theaters longer than 13 weeks, but only three of them made over $100,000 last weekend, so their stories are basically written already.

The number we came up with: $257 million. Now again, that seems like a ton of money for a film that's only made $147 in two weekends. But bear in mind that opening weekend numbers are usually one-third of the total box office. So the rest of that money has to come from somewhere. Is it possible for Trek to make an extra $110 million in the next 11 weeks? Or more accurately, can it make about $75 million after Memorial Day?

Even though this film will hold its audience better than anything from May, with the possible exception of Up, it's really unlikely that it can do more than $50 million or better in June. The good news for Trek is Iron Man made about $40 million last June, and that was with a giant blockbuster (Indiana Jones) consistently splitting its audience. Star Trek won't have a competitor like that; if you haven't heard, Terminator is not impressing anyone. Its box office was probably going to max out at $200 million, anyway, so now I think that number might be less.

We're not guaranteeing a $257 million finish line or anything, and clearly, that's the zenith of its potential. But anything below $230 million at this point is almost inconceivable.

AuthorColin Boyd | | in , , | Print ArticlePrint Article | | Comment2 Comments |

Reader Comments (2)

...uh...is this American or international?

Monday, May 25, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterAnonymous

American.

Sunday, May 31, 2009 | Registered CommenterColin Boyd

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