20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982)
1. Star Trek II Broke Box Office Records & Turned A Profit But Not According To “Hollywood Accounting”
When Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan opened in June of 1982, it grossed $14,346,221. This was the largest opening weekend in movie history, surpassing the previous record holder, Superman II (1980), by about $250,000.
According to a New York Times report from June 8, 1982, the film was projected to turn a tidy profit, unlike the previous installment:
It is also clear that “Star Trek II” is going to earn a much higher profit than the original “Star Trek.” That movie cost $42 million, did very well at the box office and barely broke even, including television and cable sales. “Star Trek II” cost less than $12 million.
Star Trek II had actually cost $13 million while Star Trek—The Motion Picture cost at least $44 million, but this does not diminish the newspaper’s larger point. At the end of the day, Star Trek II recorded a domestic box office take of $78.9 million with $40 million going to Paramount in rentals. Against a budget of $13 million, that would mean a rough profit of $27 million (a number which does not include overseas box office, television sales, or any ancillary revenues). In comparison, Star Trek—The Motion Picture grossed $82.3 million and brought in $56 million in revenues. Against a $44 million budget, that only meant a profit of $12 million—less than half of what the studio took home from the sequel.
Of course, in classic “Hollywood accounting” style, that’s not what Paramount reported to anyone who was owed a percentage of the profits. Individuals owed a piece of the pie included Harve Bennett, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, Gene Roddenberry, and Jack B. Sowards. Paramount told this group that as of September 23, 1983, the movie was somehow $7,448,200 in the red. Inevitably, this resulted in an audit, the results of which are not known to this author, who, sadly, is not a profit participant in Star Trek II.
(This was not the first or the last time an audit was required to get the studio to pay out profit participation owed from a Star Trek project. For many years, the studio claimed the original series had lost money, until the threat of a lawsuit led them to finally pay out to Shatner, Roddenberry, and other profit participants in 1984.)
NOTE: Special thanks to Maurice Molyneuax, John Tenuto, and Marie Jose Tenuto.