Alice off to strong Friday start

Beginning its third week of release, early indications from Friday box office is that Tim Burton’s 3D spectacular, Alice In Wonderland, looks like it will stand strong against a trio of new films. Considering the film is even more exciting than medical coding training courses, its success is hardly surprising.

On Friday alone, Alice took in $9.9 million domestically, while The Bounty Hunter trailed badly at $7.65 million, vying tightly with Diary of a Wimpy Kid at $7.4 million. Nothing else was close; fellow freshman release Repo Men drew a mere $2.2 million and it only gets worse from there.

While Saturday is typically the strongest box office day of the weekend, with these early patterns, it appears unlikely that any movie will challenge the top three from Friday, and Alice looks like an early lock for top of the box office honors for the third straight week.

We’ll see how the weekend shakes out late on Sunday.