Well, we’re certainly disappointed. We thought there was a film out this weekend called How To Dragon Your Train.

But was there? Was there balls. We thought we’d be in for two hours of handy instructions about how to turn a regular passenger locomotive into an actual dragon, maybe by attaching a set of canvas wings to it and strapping a flame-thrower to the front or something. But no. Instead we got How To Train Your Dragon, a cartoon about a boy with a pet dragon. Who’d want to watch that?

And we weren’t the only ones to be fooled, either. How To Train Your Dragon is the number one movie at the weekend box office – a fact that we can only attribute to the high demand for instructional documentaries about transforming rail-based transportation systems into mythical fire-breathing creatures.

How To Train Your Dragon is the new weekend box office number one, finally knocking Alice In Wonderland off its stupid ginger perch. Why? Because How To Train Your Dragon is a DreamWorks animation, that’s why. Everyone knows what they’ll get from a DreamWorks animation – flashy visuals, the vocal talents of some of Hollywood’s biggest names and a compulsive need to reference so many ephemeral pop culture objects that it’s bound to look as painfully dated as an episode of The Brady Bunch Hour by this time next year.

Still, here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - How To Train Your Dragon (Possibly top of the weekend box office because people heard it was a film starring Gerard Butler and a repulsive scaly creature and simply assumed that they were going to see The Bounty Hunter) $43,300,000

2 - Alice In Wonderland (In retrospect, maybe all Johnny Depp films would be improved by a hacky, tacked-on scene near the end where he does a badly-animated dance to some horrible beatbox music. Chocolat definitely would) $17,300,000

3 - Hot Tub Time Machine (Hey, maybe an internet-friendly title doesn’t make for a successful movie after all. Maybe all those Oscars that Snakes On A Plane and Megashark Vs Giant Octopus won really were a fluke, then) $13,650,000

4 - The Bounty Hunter (Who even hunts Bounties, anyway? They’re usually right there in front of you, between the Wispas and the Twixes. Sorry) $12,400,000

5 – Diary Of A Wimpy Kid (Literally no idea about this film, apart from the fact that it’s directed by a man named Thor Freudenthal so you should go and see it so it becomes successful and he’s allowed to make more films so that we can type his name again. Thor Freudenthal. Heee) $10,000,000

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Tagged as: How To Train Your Dragon, Weekend Box Office