“Star Trek Into Darkness,” the newest installment in the classic intergalactic franchise, blasted to the top of movie box office charts with $70.6 million in weekend ticket sales at theaters in the United States and Canada.

The new 3-D voyage for Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise knocked mighty “Iron Man 3″ into second place, while the Marvel superhero sequel grabbed $35.2 million. Jazz Age drama “The Great Gatsby” finished third with $23.4 million, according to studio estimates.

Weekend ticket sales for “Into Darkness” failed to reach the level of 2009 movie “Star Trek,” which took in $75.2 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters without a lift from higher 3-D ticket prices.

However, its overall take from Wednesday through Sunday beat the 2009 numbers, with “Into Darkness” taking in $84.1 million. The 2009 installment took in $79.2 million for the same period, according to distributor Paramount.

“Into Darkness,” a $190 million production, opened late on Wednesday to grab a head start on the weekend. The take through Sunday was shy of the $100 million some box office analysts projected.

Paramount said the film’s audience was comprised largely of longtime “Star Trek” fans, but was optimistic that good reviews and word of mouth would bring in a broader audience in coming weeks.

Paramount also expressed satisfaction with the film’s performance abroad. 

“To a large extent, the last film was uniquely a U.S. and Canada event, but we’re really pleased that the foreign sales are neck-and-neck with the domestic market,” said Don Harris, president of domestic theatrical distribution at Paramount, a unit of Viacom Inc.

The movie has rung up $80.5 million in international markets since opening outside North America on Thursday, Paramount said, for a combined global total of $164.5 million.

“Into Darkness” stars Chris Pine as Captain James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock, the pointy-eared, human-Vulcan first officer. British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, best known as the detective Sherlock Holmes in the BBC drama “Sherlock,” plays a villain who launches an attack on Starfleet’s base in London.

The movie is the second “Star Trek” film directed by “Lost” TV show creator J.J. Abrams, who rebooted the Star Trek franchise with more action and has attempted to broaden it to a wider audience beyond hard-core “Trekkies” who were fans of the classic 1960s TV show and 10 previous big-screen adaptations.

Abrams’ 2009 installment was a critical success, though analysts were disappointed with foreign box office sales of about $130 million, just one-third of its global take of $386 million.

Critics have embraced “Into Darkness,” which as of Sunday had earned an 87 percent positive rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences responded with an “A” rating in surveys by CinemaScore.

“Iron Man 3″ added to its blockbuster sales around the world, reaching $736.2 through Sunday for a global total of $1.07 billion less than one month after its April 24 overseas debut, according to Walt Disney Co. The movie, from Disney’s Marvel Studios, stars Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, a billionaire businessman with a superhero alter-ego.

“The Great Gatsby,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, brought its worldwide total to $132.3 million through two weekends, according to Warner Bros., the Time Warner Inc unit that released the film.

Rounding out the top five, dark action comedy “Pain & Gain,” released by Paramount and starring Mark Wahlberg, landed in fourth place with takings of $3.1 million. Animated family flick “The Croods” took the No. 5 slot with $2.8 million.

In the U.K. and Ireland, “Fast and Furious 6″ brought in $13.8 million (9 million pounds) this weekend, a record opening for distributor Universal in those territories. The film will open in the United States, Canada, and 59 international territories on Friday.

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Tony Stark’s superhero antics kept the blockbuster “Iron Man 3″ on top of movie charts in the United States and Canada, beating out a strong debut over the weekend for lavish Jazz Age drama “The Great Gatsby.”

Coming off a gigantic opening a week earlier, “Iron Man 3″ commanded $72.5 million in ticket sales from Friday through Sunday in its second weekend. “Gatsby,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as millionaire Jay Gatsby in the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald tale, earned a strong $51.1 million, according to studio estimates.

Domestic ticket sales for “Iron Man 3″ dropped 58 percent from a week earlier, when the film hauled in $174.1 million for the second-biggest movie opening of all time. The film from Walt Disney Co.’s Marvel Studios stars Robert Downey Jr. as Stark, a billionaire businessman with a superhero alter ego.

International sales for “Iron Man 3″ reached a massive $664 million through Sunday after adding $89 million from the weekend, Disney said. The film’s worldwide take now stands at $949 million.

“Gatsby” outpaced pre-weekend forecasts for an opening of up to $45 million. Directed by Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, it is the latest Hollywood rendition of Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, “The Great Gatsby.” A 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow fared poorly at the box office.

DiCaprio stars in the title role, a millionaire pining for a lost love, played by Carey Mulligan, during the height of the hedonistic 1920s. Tobey Maguire and Joel Edgerton also star. Rapper Jay-Z produced the soundtrack.

“We never expected to open this picture at this level,” said Dan Fellman, president of theatrical distribution for Warner Bros., the Time Warner Inc unit that distributed the film.

Fellman said the picture, which has been accorded the prestigious opening night slot at this week’s Cannes Film Festival, was now well-positioned for a long run into the summer as an alternative to traditional action movies.

The majority of ticket buyers were female by 59 percent to 41 percent, and 31 percent of ticket buyers were under age 25, Warner Bros. said.

“We’re going to have a nice, long healthy run,” he told Reuters.

DiCaprio’s performance was widely praised, but the movie, which cost about $105 million to produce, received a mixed reception from critics. As of Saturday, 48 percent of reviews recommended the film on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

But in its opening weekend, the film very nearly eclipsed the total $57.4 million take of Luhrmann’s most successful film, “Moulin Rouge,” which went on to win several Academy Awards.

Elsewhere over the weekend, dark action comedy “Pain & Gain” starring Mark Wahlberg placed a distant third with $5 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters.

Comedy “Peeples,” the other new nationwide release, finished fourth with $4.9 million. Produced by Tyler Perry, the film stars Craig Robinson and Kerry Washington in the story of a well-off family’s reunion that is interrupted when a man arrives to seek their daughter’s hand in marriage.

Baseball drama “42″ finished in fifth place with $4.7 million.

“Star Trek Into Darkness,” which opens domestically on Wednesday, took in $31.7 million in seven international territories including Britain, Mexico, Australia and Germany, Paramount Pictures reported.

“Pain & Gain” was released by Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc. Lions Gate Entertainment distributed “Peeples,” and Warner Bros. distributed “42.”

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‘Iron Man 3’
Director: Shane Black
Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow
Rating: PG-13
3 (out of 5) globes

The first time Robert Downey Jr. and writer/director Shane Black teamed up, few people cared. With 2005’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” they were two ‘80s casualties. Downey was a recovering druggie; Black, meanwhile, was Hollywood’s former highest-paid screenwriter facing down backlash over having made too much money.

With “Lethal Weapon,” “The Last Boy Scout” and others, Black created the modern smartass action blockbuster, only to find his pricey scripts turning meager profits. Cut to 2013. “Iron Man 3,” their belated reunion, grossed in 10 seconds what “Kiss Kiss” made in its entire run. The times, they are a-changing back.

Black was brought on as a replacement for departing auteur Jon Favreau, and overhauled a massive product that was already running through the machine. The opening sequence of “Iron Man 3” is thrilling, which is to say it’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” but with guys flying around in billion-dollar supersuits. It’s 1999 and Downey’s Tony Stark, a few years from rebirth, skulks about a New Year’s Eve party, wooing a hottie scientist (Rebecca Hall) and relentlessly mocking a nerdy fanboy (Guy Pearce). Pissy quips fly fast, while the narration calls attention to the script’s own making. “You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this,” cracks Stark — a self-aware gag right out of “Kiss Kiss.”

Alas, such introspection couldn’t last in a billion-dollar grosser that regularly requires clangy action set pieces. It soon becomes apparent that while Black might have beefed up a project that would have been as tiresome as the doughy “Iron Man 2,” he was likely under orders to leave some of it stupid. Here, Stark is attacked by a bin Laden-ish heavy known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). He might have connections to the aforementioned Pearce, who cleaned himself up into a golden god not above showing off his six-pack.

In a nice twist, Stark spends the majority of the film sans suit, stranded in Nowhere, Tennessee. An even better twist, one that ought not to be spoiled, comes later. (Let’s just say that it elegantly and amusingly disarms the queasy racism of having a villain in 2013 called “The Mandarin.”)

Black is a dark guy, but his darkness often manifests itself in hilariously caustic one-liners. He goes as far as he can in tailoring the project to his own whims, and he treats the material he can’t change with indifference — if not active hostility. Don Cheadle’s War Machine has been painted red, white and blue, and renamed the Iron Patriot, a cheesy rebranding Stark never misses an opportunity to belittle. Black saves his most hostile lines for when Stark is suddenly stuck with a kid sidekick. Turning Tony Stark into W.C. Fields, at the start of the summer season, no less, is a welcome development.

It’s odd for a filmmaker to try defeating the very cliches he once helped create. But then, times have changed: Hollywood product is more impersonal; personality is discouraged. Black, once the architect of blockbusters, is now an iconoclast. His “Iron Man 3” doesn’t have a heart (as though that’s a bad thing) but it does have a genuine sense of fun — even the noisiest, nonsense-iest parts are delivered with a smile. This isn’t “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” redux, but it’s closer to it than we deserve.

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1 ‘Iron Man 3’
Shane Black, once the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood, reunites with his “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” star Robert Downey Jr. to fun up a franchise that got a little doughy in the second installment. And Guy Pearce is in there, too? Boom.

2 ‘Something in the Air’
French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Summer Hours,” “Carlos”) turns once again to his youth in the ‘70s for inspiration, with this memory piece about a young artist who flirts with political activism when Europe was teeming with radicals.

3 ‘The Iceman’
Michael Shannon, soon for General Zod in the Superman thing, plays Richard Kuklinski, who lived a kind of real-life “True Lies”: a family man whose wife and daughters had no idea he was a contract killer.

4 ‘Kiss of the Damned’
Like her siblings, Xan Cassavetes, son of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, is a filmmaker. A cinephile (she made the doc “Z Channel: A Magnificent Obession”), she’ll bring her viewing history to this vampire twist.

5 ‘Post Tenebras Lux’
Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas finally follows up his marvel “Silent Light” with this maddeningly fragmented whatzit, which involves hot red devils and orgies and rugby and men pulling off their own heads and other seemingly random sights.

6 ‘What Maisie Knew’
Scott McGhee and David Siegel (“The Deep End”) return with this drama about a little girl caught in a nasty custody battle between her divorcing ‘rents, based on the novel by Henry James. Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan and Alexander Skarsgard star.

7 ‘Love is All You Need’
Taking a title from the worst Beatles song, director Susanne Bier (“Brothers”) and her former Dogme co-conspirator Anders Thomas Jensen does a no doubt intense twist on the rom-com, about a woman with cancer who falls in love with a widower at a wedding. Pierce Brosnan is in there, too.

8 ‘Greetings from Tim Buckley’
Penn Badgley does his best Jeff Buckley in this portrait of the sensitive singer-songwriter as a young, pre-fame man, embodying him in the lead-up to the concert that would first make him a name. The talented (and brilliantly-named) Imogen Poots co-stars.

9 ‘Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s’
Is this a first? This documentary profiles not a person but a store, namely Bergdorf’s and its storied legacy. Why not? Among the interviewed are Tom Ford, Karl Lagenfeld, Candice Bergen, Nicole Richie and the Olsen Twins.

10 ‘Pain & Gain’
We wanted another Michael Bay film. And for our sins we got one.

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Gwyneth Paltrow just isn’t feeling it anymore when it comes to her acting career, according to Us Weekly. “She’s lost her passion for movies,” a source says. “She won’t quit acting. Her plan is to do one, maybe two supporting parts a year.” So what else will Paltrow use to fill her time? The source says she will mainly focus on her lifestyle Web site, Goop, with an aim to emulate another blonde star: Jessica Simpson. “She admires Jessica’s empire,” the source says. “She wants to make a killing.”

Charlize Theron‘s 1-year-old adopted son, Jackson, is already making headlines for his A-list birthday party, according to E! News. “Sandra Bullock was one of the first guests to arrive with her son Louis,” a source says of the fete held Sunday at Theron’s Hollywood Hills home. “As they walked into the party, they bumped into Chelsea Handler who had also just arrived in a limousine. They all walked in together and headed for the backyard where children’s music was playing and kids were running around.”

While Taylor Swift has already hit the recording studio in the wake of her split from Harry Styles, the One Direction member has pretty much kept mum about the ordeal — until now. “Yeah, I’m good,” Styles said when asked during an interview with Capital FM radio how he’s holding up. And when pressed specifically about Swift’s swipe at him during her Grammy Awards performance of “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Styles took the high road. “She’s a great performer. She always performs great and she’s always good on the stage,” Styles says. “She’s done it for a long time. She knows what she’s doing on stage. It was just another good Taylor Swift performance. It was good.” Hopefully it won’t be too awkward when they run into each other, as both Swift and One Direction are set to perform at the Brit Awards tonight.

Though she started the month dodging pregnancy rumors, Fergie is happy to finally announce that she and husband Josh Duhamel are expecting their first child. “Josh and me and baby makes three,” Fergie tweeted this week — along with the hashtag “my lovely baby bump.” She also posted photos of herself and Duhamel as children. The pair tied the knot in 2009.

Renee Zellweger is enjoying her relationship with guitarist Doyle Bramhall, and she’s not afraid to show it. The pair was spotted making out on the beach during their current Hawaiian vacation, according to E! News. “They have been really cute together,” a source says. “They’ve been openly kissing and cuddling. He even has his guitar on vacation with him and was playing it for her while they waited for their rental car.”

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