Star Trek Into Darkness *Cheesy Puns To #1 [Weekend Box Office]

From Box Office Mojo.

Star Trek Into Darkness *beamed to the top of the box office this weekend with a domestic take of $84M. Not a bad showing, though expectations were tracking a little closer to $100M.

The knee jerk reaction here is to blame the lack of a strong villain in the marketing campaign. Since Iron Man 3 barely relied on The Mandarin to carry its marketing, that isn’t always the case. Still, here I think it might be right.

As I outlined in my video review, I think it would’ve been smarter to come out and say who the villain was instead of saving it for a somewhat meaningless reveal. That and franchises have a ceiling. There are only so many people interested no matter what you do.

Iron Man 3 passed the billion dollar threshold this past week and ended up with a domestic score of $35M in its third week of release; good enough for second place. The Shane Black-directed action/adventure should stick around the top five for at least two more weeks. Video Review here.

The Great Gatsby dropped to third place with an estimated gross of $23M and yet it’s still on pace to out gross both of DiCaprio’s recent hits, Oscar-winning The Departed and Most Painfully Obvious Twist award-winning Shutter Island. Video Review here.

Pain & Gain, the true story of Mark Wahlberg’s surgically-implanted T-Rex arms pectoral thrusted to #4 (that’s an exercise right?) with $3M. Depending on P&A, P&G should break about even before it…oh boy…umm…cardio blasts (???) its way out of theaters. Video Review here.

The Croods bounced back into the top five because someone is apparently still seeing this movie. If it’s you, knock it off.