All 13 Star Trek movies officially ranked

There have been 13 entries so far in the Star Trek movie franchise, each with wildly varying budgets and box office results. We’ll be looking at how each of the movies did and which reigns as the top entry.

When it comes to movies fan reactions, critical reviews and dollars earned don’t always match up, fans tend to vote with their wallets and that often leads to differing strategies by movie studios about where to go with the future of a franchise after either a huge success or a poor showing and Star Trek is a franchise that shows off all of these things in abundance.

You may have heard of the ‘Odd Even Curse’ in which some Star Trek fans believe that every odd-numbered movie is destined to be worse than the even-numbered movies, in fact this curse has long been supported by fan reviews of each film where the odd-numbered entries tend to have the lower scores, but does this curse extend to the box office gross of each entry? We will take a look at that as we go along.

For the purposes of this article we will look at the budget and box office numbers for each movie and use them to create a metric to judge them, that metric will be an ROI%, or Return on Investment which provides us with a number free from worries of inflation. This way we are comparing apples to apples and not handicapping movies from the 1970’s and 80’s with modern expectations.

The numbers used to create this metric are as follows:

The production budget: How much money they spent to make the movies.
The worldwide Box Office: How much money the movie earned in all countries of release combined.
Return on Investment or ROI is calculated with the formula ((Box office – Budget) / Budget) and expressed as a percentage.