Good news, bad news for Star Trek Into Darkness — the sequel to JJ Abrams' 2009's Star Trek reboot debuted to the second-best opening weekend for any film in the franchise. Unfortunately, it wound up trailing Star Trek itself, which opened to $75.2 million four years ago. Many analysts predicted that Star Trek Into Darkness would do better than its predecessor, possibly even cracking the $100 million opening weekend mark. So what held this sequel back? Was it a nice summer weekend? Did people want to go outside? Did the film's overwhelmingly positive reviews (87 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) get drowned out by the very vocal few reviewers who disliked Star Trek Into Darkness?
As for the rest of the top five, Iron Man 3 has now not only outgrossed every other Iron Man movie but every other Marvel Cinematic Universe movie with the exception of The Avengers. Not bad for a film that's only just wrapped up its third weekend. Iron Man 3 is also already the 25th highest grossing film domestically.
1. Star Trek Into Darkness (N)
$70.56 million ($84.09 million)
Despite Abrams' name being on almost every other movie, he's only directed four of them: Star Trek, Mission: Impossible III, Super 8 and Star Trek Into Darkness. While it wasn't a hard feat, Star Trek Into Darkness is now Abrams' second-highest opening weekend. I'm guessing that a certain Star Wars sequel will completely change his career scorecard in 2015.






