We at TGD have followed the development of Star Trek Into Darkness for several years, from the movie finally getting the green light, to the release date and beyond. We’ve seen a lot of Trek haters out there, and we’ve seen the public quickly turn on a lot of movies, but that didn’t stop Into Darkness from topping the home entertainment charts at #1.
As the Hollywood Reporter tells us, 72% of the sales were BluRay, and it hit #1 on all three major sales charts, including Nielsen VideoScan’s First Alert, the primary disc sales chart, and Home Media Magazine’s rental charts.
Despite all this, Entertainment Weekly wondered “Why is everyone so upset about Star Trek Into Darkness?,” in the magazine’s geek section, Entertainment Geekly. As Darren Franich writes, “resentment can build slowly in the geekosphere,” citing the Star Trek convention in Vegas calling Into Darkness the worst movie of the franchise, as well as Darkness screenwriter Roberto Orci going nuts against the haters on Twitter.
So it should be interesting to see how much audience goodwill will be there for the next Trek movie, which JJ Abrams will not direct. The third movie in a franchise can be very tricky to get right (look at Return of the Jedi, The Dark Knight Rises, and Spider-Man 3, to name a few), and it’s ironic that with the original Trek movies the second one was the best, but trying to revitalize the saga of Khan definitely got mixed results this time.
