borrows heavily from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. To make the parallels clear to viewers, Meyer added a visible copy of Moby-Dick to Khan's dwelling. Khan liberally paraphrases Ahab, with "I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up!". Khan quotes Ahab's tirade at the end of the novel verbatim with his final lines: "To the last I grapple with thee; from Hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."Melville, 427. online Release The film's novelization, written by Vonda N. McIntyre, stayed on the New York Times paperback bestsellers list for more than three weeks. Unlike the previous film, Wrath of Khan was not promoted with a toy line, although Playmates Toys created Khan and Saavik figures in the 1990s, and in 2007 Art Asylum crafted a full series of action figures to mark the film's 25th anniversary. In 2009, IDW Publishing released a comic adaptation of the film, and Film Score Monthly released an expanded score.The Wrath of Khan opened on June 4, 1982 in 1,621 theaters in the United States. It made $14,347,221 in its opening weekend, at the time the largest opening weekend gross in history. It went on to earn $78,912,963 in the US, becoming the sixth highest-grossing film of 1982. It made $97,000,000 worldwide. Although the total gross of The Wrath of Khan was less than that of The Motion Picture, it was more profitable due to its much lower production cost. Reception Critical response was positive. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 86% of 73 critics have given the film a positive review, recording an average score of 8.1/10. After the lukewarm reaction to the first film, fan response to The Wrath of Khan was highly positive. The film's success was credited with renewing interest in the franchise. Mark Bernardin of Entertainment Weekly went further, calling The Wrath of Khan "the film that, by most accounts, saved Star Trek as we know it"; it is now considered one of the best films in the series. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called the film "wonderful dumb fun." Gene Siskel gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "a flat-out winner, full of appealing characters in engaging relationships in a futuristic film that has a delightfully old-fashioned sense of majesty about its characters and