No wonder people are flocking to see Alice In Wonderland – where else would they get to see the dream team of Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp?

Oh, that’s right. Everywhere else. Anyway, why has Alice In Wonderland topped the weekend box office? Early reviews have largely been negative, citing a lazily-defined plot and an over-reliance on computer animated 3D graphics as its main weaknesses, so maybe the reason why it’s done so well is because people keep confusing it with Avatar.

Or maybe it’s top of the weekend box office because everyone thought they were really seeing a film called Alice In Sunderland, and then became disappointed when they were presented with a fantastical fairy tale instead of a grim melodrama about a dirt-covered northerner shuffling around a bleak industrial town eating dead animals off the road for sustenance.

It’s a big weekend for movies. Thanks to yesterday’s Oscars, we now know what the best film of the last year was, and – more importantly – we also know what Meryl Streep looks like in a nice dress. And thanks to the US weekend box office, we know that people quite like Alice In Wonderland. Or at least they liked the look of Alice In Wonderland enough to pay to see it, and then didn’t hate it enough to torch their cinemas to the ground midway through act two. That’s roughly the same thing, isn’t it?

Here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton loves the UK enough to adapt Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd and now Alice In Wonderland into movies. Next up: a breathtaking reimagining of 1987 Rumpole Of The Bailey episode Rumpole And The Judge’s Elbow, starring Johnny Depp as Rumpole and Helena Bonham Carter as the judge’s elbow) $116,300,000

2 - Brooklyn’s Finest (A Tesco-style experiment. Brookyln’s Finest is the first film to be released, directed by the brain behind Training Day and starring the likes of Ethan Hawke and Richard Gere, and tickets to see it are relatively expensive. Next week it’ll release Brooklyn’s Value – a remake of Brooklyn’s Finest directed by Nick Love and starring Dean Gaffney and Paul Danan. Tickets will be 10p each) $13,500,000

3 - Shutter Island (We’ve still managed to get this far without figuring out what the big Shutter Island twist is. Unless the twist is that Leonardo DiCaprio was mad all along, in which case we may as well not bother bloody watching it now) $13,300,000

4 - Cop Out (There’s a very good chance that more people watched Bruce Willis‘s cameo in the new Gorillaz video than Bruce Willis in Cop Out this week. There’s a lesson there somewhere) $9,145,000

5 - Avatar (Almost definitely Avatar’s last week in the weekend box office. That’s unless people start spazzing out about how it did at the Oscars and go to see it again and it goes back to number one next week and our nightmare starts afresh, of course) $7,700,000

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter

Tagged as: Alice In Wonderland, Johnny Depp, Weekend Box Office