People who know me realize I’ve been trying to predict (yes call if guessing is you want) box office numbers since high school. For all those who remember “Entertainment News and Views” the quarterly magazine we published you know who I am! Or maybe not. Anyways, here I go again and unlike twenty years ago (it’s been that long) I now have at my disposal a whole wealth of numbers to showcase so let’s begin with the myth that Star Trek films don’t really do too well.

All figures compiled from www.boxofficemojo.com. Please click charts to enlarge. (Also please pardon the jpeg pictures as I am too lazy to code html tables right now!)









Take a look at the above chart carefully and you’ll see the box office performance of all ten Star Trek movies in strict dollar revenues as well as how much they made overseas (if available), their budgets (if available) and how much they made in their first weekend of release. Don’t worry I’ll break it down to what it all means a bit later.

Looking at raw numbers is actually not very useful other than seeing certain things like both Star Trek V and Star Trek Nemesis as being the two outright flops in Star movie history. We can see basic elements like 70% of all Trek films opening in the Christmas movie season as well as opening weekends seemingly come in on average in the high teens. Also note that there is only one movie to break the 100,000,000 barrier in Star Trek IV as well as the budgets on a general increase until we plateau at Nemesis’ 60,000,000 figure.

Let’s now get into the nitty gritty and drill into these numbers in a more meaningful way. As anyone can ascertain, looking at raw numbers from different years is basically pointless although Hollywood loves to keep telling people that film revenues are on the rise. It might seem that, for instance, this year’s The Dark Knight is blowing away the box office, but you can only tell by how much when you put it into relation to other films in different eras. Would you be surprised if I told you that if you adjusted for inflation it only ranks 26th highest of all time? That it has only made 41% of the total gross of the #1 film of all time?

So here is the next chart where, by the wonders of magic (called math!) I take the raw grosses and translate them into 2008 dollars.



This is not rocket science. Simply put you divide the film’s domestic box office by the estimated ticket price average for that year to get the estimated number of tickets sold which, is THE REAL INDICATOR, on how well a film did. For comparison purposes we times that estimated number of tickets sold by 7.08 which is what it is nowadays in 2008 to see how well the particular film did in today’s currency.

Now take a careful look at this chart and see what new conclusions you can begin to draw.

Right away you can see a whole wealth of new information that is more relevant. Trek’s golden era was most definitely between Trek 1-4 where grosses would have been at or approaching 200,000,000 in 2008 dollars. To put that in perspective that’s generally the size of hit as this years Kung Fu Panda, Wall-E, or Hancock. Any of those four Trek films would have cracked 2008’s top 10 and have a shot at top 5.

Then of course Star Trek V happened and the franchise took a nosedive to which it has never really fully recovered. Still, looking at the numbers one of the ones that should stand out is now the comparison between the two Trek failures. In the first chart it looked like Nemesis only made nine million less than Star Trek V but in reality the result is much more damning. Nemesis was a complete and utter box office disaster that 44% more people saw Star Trek V than Picard’s last outing. It lost 50% of its audience that saw Insurrection while having a higher budget. People with good memories will even remember the debacle in that Nemesis did not even win it’s opening weekend losing to Jennifer Lopez’s Maid in Manhattan. How’s that for rubbing salt in your wound?

Also prescient looking at this new chart is how Trek has been on a downward trend since the height of First Contact. It lost roughly 30% of its audience between First Contact and Insurrection and the aforementioned 50% between that and Nemesis. That’s an aggregate loss of 65% of the audience. In short, we call that franchise erosion.

There are many reasons that contribute to that: too many Trek shows, too many other alternatives, a general decrease in Trek’s quality, people just get tired of it etc. For all these reasons and more, Trek is showing a tell-tale sign of being ignored and thrown to the wayside.

However, based on these numbers when people mouth off and say Trek never did well at the box office they are, at best, only semi-correct. With all these numbers available you can basically break the franchise’s performance into two eras – before Trek V and after Trek V. Treks 1-4 were clearly some of the top grossing movies of those years while even Treks 6-8 featured an albeit diminished renaissance but by then you can see the series had fallen into second tier status. Still there’s no denying that the last two Trek movies have plunged the franchise straight into dire straits.













There is though the whole matter about foreign box office grosses and in this case the evidence is clear. Trek bombs hard overseas. For a series that keeps trying to portray itself as some sort of global phenomenon the numbers don’t bare any evidence of this at all. There might be pockets of success such as the UK but by and large the world outside of North America has ignored Trek.







Although we don’t have the foreign box office numbers for all the Trek movies the ones we have show a rather ominous trend of North American grosses accounting from 60-70% of total revenue. Paramount executives are probably looking at the percentage and wringing their hands in worry as to how the new Trek movie might perform. To put it bluntly, JJ Abram’s Trek cannot maintain this ratio if it expects to relaunch this franchise to any form of success. The only possibility that might offset this is a wildly optimistic scenario where Trek XI earns 250-300+ million domestic while foreign receipts maintain 30% of gross. Even then I have a feeling that Paramount will look at that result in a “glass is half full” way. By spending 150,000,000 on Trek XI they intend to hit a home run worldwide and bring Trek into the mainstream. If the new film merely mimics past Trek performance Paramount will think twice about making a sequel with a similar budget.

To put Trek’s poor foreign performance in perspective that a look at the following chart where I highlight other pure science fiction franchises and their worldwide grosses.












Notice that only in rare cases (I’m looking at you Alien 1+2) you find that total domestic box office revenue actually makes up, on average, between 40-45% of total receipts. In many cases that percentage is lower than 40%. A good rule of thumb when reading these box office numbers on how to gauge a film’s worldwide impact is precisely this ratio of domestic versus foreign receipts. Although there are always cases that go against the norm, the rule of thumb we should be looking at is really a close to 1:1 ratio. Thus a film that makes 200 million domestic should count on something around 200+ from overseas. In this light Trek movies can be easily seen as being only relevant to North Americans as the rest of the world has not jumped onto the bandwagon.

So the next time you hear someone yell that Trek movies just bomb all the time remember this quick analysis. Trek use to do very well in North America but alas has slid into the abyss with the past two features. Overseas, unfortunately, the person ranting is dead on. Trek doesn’t do well, nor has it ever done well, to the rest of the world. Will JJ Abram’s new film manage to right the ship? It is no doubt a daunting task to not only reboot (yes I know I said reboot) the franchise but also present it to a jaded worldwide audience that has managed to ignore movie Trek for over 30 years. Whatever marketing gurus Paramount has employed will no doubt be burning the midnight oil on this one as they attempt to get a new generation of fans onboard.