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Galactic box-office supremacy
Ah, the age old nerd question (well, along with “Kirk or Picard?”) — which classic sci-fi franchise is better? There’s all sorts of qualitative arguments on this topic, based on storyline, plot, characters, technology, and so on. These debates have been around since the release of Star Wars in 1977, and will most likely continue well after we’re all gone and will never provide a definitive answer.
You, however, are interested in the cold, hard, quantitative facts: which one trumps the other at the box office? Well, it… sort of depends. Read on.
Never tell me the odds
There are, as of this writing, 11 Star Trek films, all major motion pictures, all released to major theaters, none rereleased to theaters after their original run. Pretty cut and dried.
The Star Wars franchise, however, consists of six feature films, one animated feature, the 1980s and the 20th anniversary re-release of the “original” three feature films, and the IMAX re-release of Attack of the Clones. As such, it’s hard to do an “apples to apples” comparison by just presenting the total numbers for each franchise.
Box Office Mojo has the gross numbers for each of the films in both series, so I decided to do a little number crunching to even out the comparison, rather than just saying “well, go look over there.” I’ve decided, for the sake of not completely overwhelming you with numbers, to restrict this to domestic (United States) box office numbers only — also because the worldwide numbers mirror the domestic ones, so the answer is essentially the same for each breakdown. Okay, here come the numbers.
No points on my ears, but I sound like a Vulcan
First, let’s compare the total U.S. gross of all the Star Trek films with every single Star Wars film to pass through a theater — re-issue, re-release, animated and IMAX:
Star Trek: $1,013,325,741 (average $92,120,522 per film)
Star Wars: $2,217,773,316 (average $158,412,380 per film)
A solid victory for Star Wars there. Now let’s look at those same exact criteria — now adjusted for inflation:
Star Trek: $1,891,958,700 (average $171,996,200 per film)
Star Wars: $4,559,489,200 (average $325,677,800 per film)
Adjusting for inflation actually helps Star Wars here. Okay, it can be argued that counting the re-releases and re-issues of Star Wars isn’t “fair,” since Star Trek never got the same box office boost. So, slightly more apples to apples, here’s the total domestic gross, just counting original releases:
Star Trek: $1,013,325,741 (average $92,120,522 per film)
Star Wars: $1,917,957,183 (average $273,993,883 per film)
Still a pretty clear win for Star Wars — the average gross per film is rather astonishing, in fact. Let’s look at one last comparison, original releases only — adjusted for inflation:
Star Trek: $1,891,958,700 (average $171,996,200 per film)
Star Wars: $4,008,969,900 (average $572,709,985 per film)
Again, Star Wars is the clear box office winner here.
The Final Frontier
As stated, these are only the domestic numbers, for simplicity’s sake — the worldwide numbers bear out the same results:
Star Wars beats the pants off of Star Trek at the box office, in every metric.
Now, if one were to expand this argument to include rental dollars, book sales, toys, DVD sales, other assorted merchandise, and so on this could possibly fall in Star Trek‘s direction, especially considering the 30 seasons worth of TV shows that aired between 1966 and 2005.
But to be perfectly honest, I think that’s almost doctoral dissertation levels of research and work — so despite being a huge Trek fan, I’ll settle for losing this round.
Also see: Click Baby Names — Star Trek baby names from all 5 series
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