Box Office: Star Trek shows its legs while Angels And Demons Takes The Weekend

By Kevin Coll • May 18, 2009 • 2 Comments

This past weekends Box office continues to impress upon last year’s success. Up almost 5% YTD, this weekend was led by the adult-thriller Angels and Demons while Star Trek improved its bounty showing its legs in its second weekend of summer.

Reaching $147.6 million in just over ten days, it eclipsed Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home as the highest-grossing picture in the franchise. In its second week Trek logged $43 million slowing 43% from the week before giving it a smaller decline than Iron Man last year which still won its second week, but Speed Racer and What Happens in Vegas cut into its take.

Ultimately this weekend and during the week leading up to it Star Trek built to a Worldwide total of $196,875,66 which is simply awesome. It will be interesting to see how the film continues to use its legs throughout the summer.

Angels & Demons had an estimated $48 million on approximately 7,000 screens at 3,527 sites, leading the weekend ahead of a Trek.

So what does $48 million mean for Angels? It means that the movie was not as successful as the DaVinci Code but at the same time it could be more successful. What do I mean by that?

Three years ago The DaVinci Code came to around 200 more theaters than this year’s Angels and Demons after sitting longer than any book on the New York Times BestSeller list, while creating multiple controversies surrounding the novel and author Dan Brown as well as having story that provided much intrigue and scope when compared to Angels and Demons.

Da Vinci was a phenomenon whereas Angels was something that people discovered after the movie was released or after they read the book. The Da Vinci Code never revealed itself to have a sequel or open to it so the fact that Angels and Demons could take a summer weekend opening with $48 million is a large success. Also when you compare to other adult thrillers it did very well.

Box Office Mojo says,

“It was comparable to the dip from Hannibal to Red Dragon, and Angels’ start also stands as the second-biggest for a Tom Hanks movie and is among the largest in the adult thriller category. According to distributor Sony Pictures’ exit polling, 52 percent of the audience was female and 50 percent was 30 years and older, skewing slightly older than Da Vinci.”

Having seen the movie and read the book I enjoyed the film but noticed it didn’t have a youth oriented audience in the seats which is probably why Star Trek’s legs got stretched this weekend and it continued to rake in the dough for Paramount. Iron Man made $ 582 million worldwide over 22 weekends in theaters, I’d love to see Trek hit that number by the end of the summer but that may be a stretch. It will be interesting to see how it does in its third week with Terminator and Night at the Museum 2 opening against each other.

Read more from Kevin Coll >>

Be the first to like.

like this post?

(unlike)