In the curious country of Underland, there’s a certain cake that, if you eat it, will make you grow.
I wonder if the folks at Disney have been force-feeding that magical cake to the studio’s ambitious 3-D project, Alice in Wonderland. The movie’s ticket sales ballooned to an outrageous $116.3 million take over the weekend to become 2010’s highest-grossing movie in just three days. Brooklyn’s Finest, another new release, was a laughably distant second in this caucus race: Its $13.5 million haul, by comparison, wouldn’t even fill a rabbit hole.
There’s more than magical cake involved in Alice‘s early success, though. The Tim Burton-directed fantasy opened on more than 7,300 screens and earned 70% of its receipts through lucrative 3-D screenings. Nothing mad about that strategy—as Avatar proved just a few months ago.
Personally, I liked the film (as creepy and unsettling as it sometimes was), and it was fun to watch in 3-D. And this film, unlike Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tales, came with a real, honest-to-goodness story. Carroll’s books were less about plot and more a wildly imaginative travelogue—a look at a curious country and its bizarre, croquet-playing residents through the eyes of a little girl. But Burton gave Alice something more to do here than shrink, have tea and chat with flowers and, as such, I think the film—while not as whimsical or fun as the books—had a little more narrative oomph. It suggests we could all use a little more “muchness,” I think, and that’s a good lesson for us at any age.
But enough from me. Did you see Alice? Was it positively trillig? Or did you find it much too muchness?
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