Star Trek: 2009's top film at the box office...

For all the naysayers who kept insisting the new Star Trek film would be a critical and commercial disaster suck on this!!! Star Trek has not only become the best reviewed film of the year, with the highest positive review percentage of the year at Rotten Tomatoes (with nearly a perfect score), but this week the film has gone on to become the highest grossing picture of the year at the U.S. box office. Even better news is the fact that the film is still playing in 4,053 screens domestically with an impressive per screen average every week. The film has proven to have great legs and will continue to do solid business throughout the entire summer movie season.
More great news has come in from IMAX which has been cutting down on their screenings of Night at the Museum 2 in order to add more showings of Star Trek, which brought in the best receipts ever in the history of IMAX during its two week engagement.

And let's not forget international receipts, as well as TV and future home media sales for which the film has already made news with the purchase of the cable broadcast rights to the film by the FX Network for the sum of 24 million dollars in a deal that doesn't even grant the network the exclusive rights to the picture. Which means Paramount can make more sales simultaneously to both basic and premium cable networks, as well as broadcast networks.

Also think of all the money Paramount has collected so far on ancillary rights and tie-ins from their multi-million dollar, high profile partnerships with such companies as Burger King, Verizon, and Playmates Toys just to name a few. All these companies have paid millions of dollars to utilize the Star Trek brand and launch their products and ad campaigns utilizing elements from the new film.

I'm definitively seeing the film again this weekend. Here in Hollywood, even with all the big movies that have been coming out they still decided to keep it at the Cinerama Dome, which is the most coveted screen in town. By next weekend the film will have been playing at that venue for a month, quite a record these days when movies come and go in a matter of days.