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Kim Hollis: Obviously, I missed this pretty severely in my weekend forecast, which means I am just blown away by this debut weekend. I expected a 3D bump, but I also expected the extreme weirdness of Alice to turn a lot of people off and counterbalance that somewhat. Kudos to Disney for a long, sustained marketing campaign that embraced a variety of mediums, from trailers to television to terrific internet ads.

Josh Spiegel: I don't know what my expectations really were, but this blows whatever they would have been out of the water. I, like Jason, attribute this to being a movie for everyone in the family to see, along with it being in 3D, starring Johnny Depp, and being from Tim Burton. Also, it helps that Alice in Wonderland is so well-known as a story, even if most people haven't read it. Still, I wouldn't be shocked if this dropped like a stone next weekend.

Reagen Sulewski: I wonder if we can call this the first film helped by the Avatar Effect. Sure, there have been 3D films out in theaters for the last four or five years with this new technology, but something close to 80 million people in North America just got their socks blown off by Avatar's use of the technology, a lot of whom might have just thought of it as a gimmick until now (which, let's face it, it largely is in this case). That's got to leave an impression and leave people searching for more.

David Mumpower: I think Reagen's point is very well taken. We've discussed the box office behavioral pattern wherein the quality of a film directly correlates to the expected box office opening of its sequel. I'm not sure whether this is accurately defined as a corollary, but Avatar's satisfactory 3D experience has given viewers a taste for the technology. Since it's clogged up theaters for the past three months, that anticipation has been building for new products. The fact that Tim Burton is so focused on aesthetics and visuals also factors in as does the fact that Alice in Wonderland has been receiving much of that key pre-Avatar advertising with the 3D trailers. Having said all of that, I think it's somewhat difficult to evaluate what has just happened this weekend without the benefit of context. BOP started tracking 3D discussions in MMQB at the start of last year and now, only 15 months later, it's become a driving box office phenomenon. In terms of pure opening weekend scale, Alice in Wonderland is THE most surprising box office result I've covered since The Passion of the Christ. How this total stands in terms of 3D impact is probably not something we can determine until films like Clash of the Titans, Iron Man 2 and particularly Toy Story 3 have debuted.

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