American commandos couldn’t take it down. Bounty hunters failed to haul it off. Even wimpy kids fell short.
No, Tim Burton’s mighty Alice in Wonderland, after dominating the box office for the last three weeks, was finally taken down by a horde of Vikings and a dragoon of dragons.
DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon flew to the top of the box office this weekend, snatching $43.3 million in its scaly clutches. Alice, though shrinking, still finished second with $17.3 million, while another newcomer, Hot Tub Time Machine, bubbled into third with $13.7 mil.
But even with Dragon‘s weekend triumph, the folks over at DreamWorks probably weren’t letting out victorious, Viking-like belly laughs. Dragon‘s opening take was far off the pace of the industry’s most recent 3-D flicks—Avatar and Alice—and came in lower for its opening weekend than DreamWorks’ last 3-D-powered film, Monsters vs. Aliens.
Which is too bad, because I thought Dragon was a superior film (and I’m not just saying that because I had a chance to talk with one of the film’s directors). Artistically, DreamWorks has always played tag-along brother to Pixar in the world of CG animation. The studio’s produced some popular work—Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda—but when it came to sheer storytelling prowess, Pixar had (and has) towered above its competition.
Dragon still doesn’t have the artistic or narrative oomph of, say, WALL-E or Up. But DreamWorks is catching up quickly. And as DreamWorks’ films get better, they seem to be getting cleaner, as well. It had none of the bathroom humor you’d find in, say, the Shrek films, very little sexual content, and as for violence—well, OK, so it was kinda violent. But neither dragons nor Vikings are known for their passivity.
Frankly, I think Dragon may have been the best film I’ve seen in this young year of 2010. But I’ve always been partial to anything with Vikings in it. Now I want to hear from you: Did you see Dragon? And, if so, what did you think?
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