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Edwin Davies: The two main thoughts that I keep coming to when thinking about this result are that Paramount made a blunder by changing the release date to Thursday so late in the game, and that perhaps the first Star Trek reached as broad of an audience as the series is likely to without some huge wow factor to compel people to see it. On the Thursday front, I don't think that Thursday openings are an across the board terrible idea, but moving the release date of a film from a Friday to a Thursday with only weeks to go is because there's no guarantee that the word will get out to everyone. That seems to be the case here, and I firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of people who saw the film on Thursday would have seen it on Friday or Saturday if the original date had been kept, which would have given the film a $80 million plus three-day total, which is not a great improvement on the first film but does make for a neater, more positive like-for-like comparison.

On the second point, this strikes me as being a bizarro version of what happened with Iron Man 2 in relation to its predecessor. In that situation, the sequel opened significantly higher than the first one, but the lukewarm response resulted in it finishing within several million despite that strong start. At the time, I thought that this meant that the audience for Iron Man was about as big as it was going to get without something to really get people excited in the same way that the appearance of The Joker had for The Dark Knight. That "something" obviously came in the form of The Avengers, which has now given us the stellar performance of Iron Man 3. What I think we're seeing here is the same thing but with the opening weekend, rather than the final total.

Star Trek is an iconic franchise, but it's always been a fairly niche interest, which is what made the success of Abrams' first film such a pleasant surprise, but it also means that the series has to do something to draw people other than the hardcore fans. Whatever else it has in its favor, I don't think that Star Trek Into Darkness has that because it doesn't have such a readily identifiable villain like The Joker or the promise of being a genuine event like The Avengers was. Without those, the film managed to draw a pretty similar number of people on opening weekend as the first one, and at this point its best bet to match the final total of that film lies in hoping that Fast and Furious 6 flames out after next weekend.

Kim Hollis: It's weird to say that a movie with more than $80 million in revenue after four days is a disappointment, but it definitely feels like one. The first film is well-loved and there was absolutely nothing about the second film that should have sent up any warning signs. The reviews are terrific and the Cinemascores are top-notch. Word-of-mouth should be a positive. And yet, the audience didn't expand much, and perhaps that's the real problem. The audience is somewhat niche, and in the time since the release of the first film, it held steady. I think we even have some evidence that points to this when we look at demographic breakdowns and see that 73% of the audience was over 25.

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