Star Trek Box Office

Paramount's Star Trek reboot opened to $7 million at the North American box office in Thursday evening showings that began at 7pm at most of its 3800+ venues, according to Variety.com.

Last weekend, Fox's X-Men Origins: Wolverine grossed just under $5 in showings that began at Friday midnight, on its way to an $85.1m opening weekend.

Star Trek's performance also outpaced last May's Iron Man, which took in over $4m in showings that began Thursday evening, and earned $102.1 million by the close of business Sunday.

Despite the parallels between Iron Man and Star Trek - with Trek even outpacing the Marvel property in some metrics like critical reception and ticket sales % on online sites like Fandango, Paramount and rival studios are still saying tracking suggests Star Trek will not approach Iron Man's weekend figures, or even Wolverine's, though the Hollywood trade reports a number of films have outperformed their tracking indicators in recent months.

We still want to know what your prediction for Star Trek's opening weekend box office tally. Click in the link to take part in our new poll, and look for updates on the film's performance throughout the weekend. Source: http://www.newsarama.com/film/090508-star-trek-box-office.html

As early as 1960, Gene Roddenberry had put together a proposal for the science fiction series which would become Star Trek. Although he publicly marketed it as a Western in outer space, a so-called "Wagon Train to the Stars", he privately told friends that he was actually modeling it on Swift's Gulliver's Travels, intending each episode to act on two levels, first as a suspenseful adventure story, but also as a morality parable.

In the Star Trek universe, humans developed faster-than-light space travel, using a form of propulsion referred to as "warp drive", following a nuclear war and a post-apocalyptic period in the mid-21st century. According to the story timeline, the first warp flight happened on 5 April 2063, and the Vulcans, an advanced alien race, made first contact with Earth on that day after detecting the warp drive signature. Partly as a result of the intervention and scientific teachings of the Vulcans, humans largely overcame many Earth-bound frailties and vices by the middle of the 22nd century, creating a quasi-utopian society where the central role is played not by money, but rather by the need for exploration and knowledge. Later, mankind united with some of the other sentient species of the galaxy, including the Vulcans, to form the United Federation of Planets.

Star Trek stories usually depict the adventures of humans and aliens who serve in the Federation's Starfleet. The protagonists are essentially altruists whose ideals are sometimes only imperfectly applied to the dilemmas presented in the series. The conflicts and political dimensions of Star Trek form allegories for contemporary cultural realities: Star Trek: The Original Series addressed issues of the 1960s, just as later spin-offs have reflected issues of their respective eras. Issues depicted in the various series include war and peace, the value of personal loyalty, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism and feminism, and the role of technology.^[4] Gene Roddenberry stated: "[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network." Source: wikipedia.org

Ok, lastly - Who Remembers that STAR TREK Girl on American Idol? I still love that thing she said "I am a trekkie - duh and I am going to the LA convention center for the star trek convention - duh"