The new Star Trek movie's opening day is nearer than you may think.
For those who note such things in their stardate calendars, May 7, not May 8 as long reported, will go down as the Enterprise restart's official opening day—or night, as it were, with (non-sneak) screenings kicking off nationwide around 7 p.m. Thursday.
Regardless of when the movie opens, the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations is calling for a $60 million-something Friday-Sunday debut weekend.
For a Star Trek movie, that gross would easily be a franchise record. For a summer movie, it'd be about $20 million or so off the pace of last weekend's X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Not that Scotty's engineers should blow a gear over that last stat.
Exhibitor Relations' Chad Haritgan thinks Star Trek—good buzz, great reviews and all—can't be expected to keep up with a relatively young X-Men/Wolverine franchise. At least not right now.
"This is a reboot," Haritgan says of the J.J. Abrams-directed Star Trek. "This is essentially the first film in a series that needs to earn that audience back."
With a $60 million or so debut, Star Trek would match up with two other high-profile reboots, Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins ($48.7 million in 2005) and Bryan Singer's Superman Returns ($52.5 million in 2006).
The Batman fellow, in particular, ended up doing all right.