Box-Office Weekend: Hanks by a Hair

It wasn't quite the Preakness, with pundits left baffled by a filly winning for the first time in almost a century, but the box-office race was closer than expected. The raw estimates for the weekend: Angels & Demons $48 million, Star Trek $43 million. In movie-industry terms, nearly a photo finish.

There's the kind of movie people see because they have to — because it's the weekend's big new attraction, and marketing and habit have schooled them to want to see it on opening day. And occasionally there's a film people see because they want to — because a friend told them it's fun, or they've already enjoyed it and want to return. This weekend, obligation was represented by Angels & Demons, a sequel of sorts to the 2006 superhit The Da Vinci Code, with the same star, Tom Hanks, and director, Ron Howard; and pure movie pleasure, by last week's winner, Star Trek, which has enjoyed enthusiastic reviews and word of mouth. Angels beat Trek, but not quite in the way a debuting blockbuster should steamroll a movie that opened the previous weekend. (See TIME's photos of Star Trek's most notorious villains.)

The reasons for the relatively close finish — a new hit typically doubles the weekend take of the movie it's replaced — are easy to enumerate. The Da Vinci Code was a publishing phenomenon with the added balm of religious controversy; the movie version earned $77 million its first weekend. Angels, actually a prequel, didn't generate the kind of heat that spurs audiences to see it immediately. Also, Dan Brown, the author of both Da Vinci and Angels, is a powerhouse literary name but not yet a megamovie franchise; Star Trek, the latest in a series of film spin-offs that date back 30 years, has brand recognition few can match. And the target audience for best-selling novels made into movies is older than the action-fantasy crowd, and typically slower to get into theaters.

Finally, there's the man above the title. A genuine star who makes hit movies, Hanks has headlined 14 films with a domestic gross of more than $100 million — more than Will Smith (12) and Julia Roberts and Adam Sandler (10 each); only Tom Cruise can match that haul. But Hanks' films usually don't open with a big bang; audiences discover them over time, and by the end, he has a Forrest Gump. At 52, Hanks is not the ideal age for a teen kid's movie icon; his one starring role since Da Vinci, in Charlie Wilson's War, brought in only $65 million. So Hanks should probably be happy with the huge salary he earned for making Angels, for the fact that it did manage to edge out the competition for the weekend's No. 1 slot.

The weekend estimates, from Box Office Mojo:

Angels & Demons, $48 million, first weekend
Star Trek, $43 million; $147.6 million, second week
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, $14.8 million; $151.1 million, third week
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, $6.8 million; $40.1 million, third week
Obsessed, $4.6 million; $62.6 million, fourth week
17 Again, $3.4 million; $58.4 million, fifth week
Monsters vs Aliens, $3 million; $190.6 million, eighth week
The Soloist, $2.4 million; $27.5 million, fourth week
Next Day Air, $2.3 million; $7.6 million, second week
Earth, $1.7 million; $29.1 million, fourth week

See TIME's top 10 Star Trek moments.