LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Star Trek: Into Darkness” has warped its way to a $70.6 million domestic launch from Friday to Sunday, though it’s not setting any light-speed records with a debut that’s lower than the studio’s expectations.

The latest voyage of the starship Enterprise fell short of its predecessor, 2009′s “Star Trek,” which opened with $75.2 million.

Since premiering Wednesday in huge-screen IMAX theaters and expanding Thursday to general cinemas, “Into Darkness” has pulled in $84.1 million, well below distributor Paramount’s initial forecast of $100 million. The film has added $80.5 million overseas.

The “Star Trek” sequel bumped “Iron Man 3″ down to second-place after two weekends on top. Robert Downey Jr.‘s superhero saga took in $35.2 million domestically and $40.2 million overseas to shoot its worldwide total to nearly $1.1 billion.

Bruno Mars — and his band — kicked off the Billboard Music Awards in silky red suits that matched their silky dance moves, with bright gold disco balls hanging above them.

Mars performed his new single, the upbeat and old-school flavored “Treasure.”

Nicki Minaj, who is set to perform with Lil Wayne, won the first award for top rap artist, beating out Drake, Flo Rida, Pitbull and Psy.

“I definitely did not expect this one,” she said, wearing a bright red dress.

Today’s biggest stars — from Taylor Swift to fun. to Maroon 5 — are the key finalists at Sunday’s awards show, airing live from MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on ABC. Those acts are up for 11 awards each; Rihanna, Carly Rae Jepsen and One Direction are up for 10, nine and eight trophies, respectively.

Most of the top stars will also blaze the stage, too, including Swift, Justin Bieber, Miguel, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Chris Brown, Selena Gomez and others.

Prince, who will receive the icon award, will also hit the stage, and Madonna, to be named top touring artist, will make an appearance.

Jepsen, whose nine nominations include top Hot 100 song for the ubiquitous “Call Me Maybe,” top female artist and top new artist, will also present an award.

“The Billboard Awards is kind of a nostalgic one for me because it was the first awards show I attended outside of Canada,” the 27-year-old recalled in an interview. “I had never really done anything quite so big. And to be going back a year later, and to be nominated, and then to also being doing all the fun stuff like pick a dress, and see the party, and watch the show — I feel just lucky to be involved.”

Jepsen’s mentor, Bieber, is up for the night’s biggest award, top artist. Other nominees include Swift, Rihanna, One Direction and Maroon 5. Swift is the only U.S. act nominated for top Billboard 200 album for her multiplatinum “Red,” which will compete with One Direction’s first and second albums — “Up All Night” and “Take Me Home” — Mumford & Sons’ “Babel” and Adele’s 10 million-selling “21,” which won the award last year.

Bieber, Swift and Mars are also up for the fan-voted milestone award.

Comedian-actor Tracy Morgan the show’s host. It’s celebrating its third year back on the scene following a five-year break.

Jepsen, whose new single “Tonight I’m Getting Over You” features Minaj, said she’s excited to see the rapper perform, but she’s also happy to be in her seat and not onstage.

“I can remember being like just a big bundle of nerves last time,” she said. “I’ve had a year of experience under my belt, and I’ll probably still be nervous, but I’ll be way more excited than anything.”

Jennifer Lopez, The Band Perry, Pitbull, Christina Aguilera, Ed Sheeran, David Guetta and Kacey Musgraves will also perform Sunday night. Presenters include Shania Twain, Psy, Celine Dion, Miley Cyrus and CeeLo Green.

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Online:

http://www.billboard.com/bbma

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Follow Mesfin Fekadu at http://www.twitter.com/MusicMesfin

CANNES, France (AP) — Associated Press journalists open their notebooks at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival:

A DIFFERENT TUNE FOR TIMBERLAKE

In the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” Justin Timberlake sings music set to a very different beat than “Suit and Tie.”

Timberlake plays a bearded pop folkie in the film, which was to premiere Sunday night at the Cannes Film Festival, about the music scene of early 1960s Greenwich Village. Oscar Isaac stars as a more serious but less successful folk musician than Timberlake’s smiley Jim Berkey.

Speaking to reporters Sunday, Timberlake called Berkey “part of the transition that is sort of the underbelly of the time.” The film summons the period of New York folk just before Bob Dylan arrived in the early ’60.

“Obviously, it’s on the surface, a different style from the music that I make in real life,” said Timberlake. “But listen, man. I grew up in Tennessee, the home of the blues, the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll — Memphis — and a lot of country music. So my first musical lessons were given to me by my grandfather an old Gibson guitar. He taught me how to fingerpick.”

Timberlake helped write the music to the film’s most comical song, “Please, Mr. Kennedy,” which he sings with Isaac and Adam Driver of “Girls.” The oft-repeated chorus goes: “Please, Mr. Kennedy, don’t shoot me into outer space.”

Timberlake got reflective about the curious mix of talent, luck and timing that goes into a music act breaking out. In contrast to the success Timberlake has had in music and acting, the characters of “Llewyn Davis” are those for whom things never click.

“I’ve been in the right place and met the wrong people, and I’ve been in the wrong place and met the right people,” the former boy band singer said. “Usually, the second one ends up being the thing that can catapult someone’s career.”

Timberlake suggested disregarding how one’s work is received.

“There’s a lot of analysis now, a lot of analytics on what might be success and what might be failure,” he said. “I don’t know that I would measure the success or failure of it by how it’s perceived because once it’s done, it’s sort of out there. You have to let it live in the ether.”

— Jake Coyle, http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

Young British actor George MacKay is making a splash at Cannes — literally, amid the weekend’s torrential downpours — with his compelling central performance in mythic maritime drama “For Those In Peril.”

Set in a fishing town on the stark Scottish coast, Paul Wright’s debut feature stars 21-year-old MacKay as sole survivor of a boat accident that killed five others, including his elder brother. MacKay carries the intense and poetic film as a young man struggling to cope with loss, even as his survival alienates him from his bereaved neighbors.

“You got our film and our weather, too,” MacKay joked, sitting in a wind-whipped beachside cafe during interviews for the film in Cannes.

Playing in Cannes’ Critics’ Week competition, the movie has garnered strong reviews for its exploration of guilt, masculinity and mythology.

It’s a mature and meaty role for MacKay, who got his movie start aged 10 as one of the Lost Boys in P.J. Hogan’s 2003 adaptation of “Peter Pan,” shot at Warner Bros’ studios on Australia’s Gold Coast.

“It was mad. They built a pirate ship — it was extraordinary. I think, the fact that we were 10, I don’t think we realized how ridiculous the scale (was),” said MacKay, who also appeared alongside Clive Owen in 2009 family drama “The Boys Are Back.”

“For Those in Peril” was a much smaller-scale operation, shot over six weeks in a small town in northeast Scotland — and, for several key sequences, in the cold North Sea.

The boundlessly enthusiastic MacKay says even the frigid water scenes were made bearable by “lots of cups of tea … lots of towels, lots of food.”

“We were kept safe,” he said. “We were out in the middle of the ocean doing it and we had the water safety guys come — very dramatic — shooting across in their little (boat), whack you out and wrap you in towels. It was all good.”

And the town had a bonus: “Best fish and chips you’ve ever had.”

—Jill Lawless, http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

NEW YORK (AP) — Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow was honored by his peers this weekend and in turn shared a few tips about his craft.

Chernow, 64, received the BIO award from the Biographers International Organization, a nonprofit established in 2010. During a lunchtime gathering Saturday at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Chernow spoke about some of his most famous subjects, from John D. Rockefeller to George Washington, and how their public reputations often concealed a far more interesting private person.

“Once upon a time, biography was a very formal, straight-laced affair,” said Chernow, a Pulitzer winner in 2011 for his Washington biography. “But nowadays we all expect the enterprising biographer to ferret out that hidden self.”

The BIO award is given for making a “major contribution” to the field of biography. Previous winners include Robert Caro and Arnold Rampersad.

A former business journalist who has written for The Wall Street Journal and other publications, Chernow said he learned a humbling lesson while researching “Titan,” his 1998 biography of Rockefeller. Going through the oil baron’s papers, Chernow had expected to unearth “sordid tales of collusion with the railroads, the bribing of entire state legislatures, the coercion of small retailers.” Instead, he found only thousands and thousands of “cryptic little business letters” that avoided proper names and specifics of any kind, as if Rockefeller feared what he wrote would end up in the hands of “a prosecuting attorney or a Senate investigative committee.”

Back home, he expressed his dismay to his wife, Valerie, who in response was “not only smiling. She was beaming.”

“I said to her indignantly, ‘What are you smiling about?’” he remembered. “And she said to me … ‘You were looking for a typical business tycoon, and what you’ve been given instead is a true original.’ The lady, as always, was absolutely right. I was frankly pursuing a cliche. I was looking for this cartoon, whereas fate had handed me something much rarer and infinitely more interesting.”

Chernow’s advice: Prepare to change your mind. He confided that while working on “The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance,” he had been charmed by Thomas W. Lamont, the suave counterpart to the volatile J.P. Morgan. A partner at J.P. Morgan & Co., and an adviser to presidential administrations of both parties, Lamont was regarded as a Wall Street liberal and an enlightened patron of the arts. Chernow said Lamont, a master of reinvention, had another, more troubling side: friend to fascists in Italy.

“By slow and subtle steps, he was being turned into a shameless apologist for Mussolini,” said Chernow, who won the National Book Award in 1990 for “The House of Morgan.”

Chernow, currently working on a book about Ulysses Grant, said the biographer was ideally a match for even the most evasive subject. Washington’s austere facade, a facade that Washington himself had ably constructed, was upended by the letters and journals of close aides that documented their leader’s seething temper. Correspondence between George Washington and Mary Ball Washington revealed that the father of his country was also an exasperated son.

Chernow came to know Washington, body and soul. He explained that Washington had just one tooth, a lower left bicuspid, by the time he became president and that the bicuspid fell during his second term. The tooth was gone but not forgotten. Washington’s dentist kept it inside a glass charm that was attached to his watch chain. Centuries later, Chernow was allowed to see the tiny relic at the New York Academy of Medicine.

“In the final analysis,” Chernow said, “as Washington’s tooth shows, there are few, if any secrets carried to the grave. In the end, the truth always will out.”