Sideshow: 'Alice' opens March like a hare

Alice in Wonderland

, the classic

Lewis Carroll

tale reimagined in 3-D by director

Tim Burton

, made $116.3 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales during the weekend, the sixth-biggest opening ever.

That was significantly higher than forecasts, easily surpassing all other films in release. And it gave Walt Disney Studios the biggest opening for a 3-D film ever - even better than Avatar.

Alice, which stars Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, also set a record for the largest opening weekend in the first quarter of the year, according to Hollywood.com Box-Office. It is also the largest opening in Imax history ($11.9 million).

Movie studios are turning to 3-D to bolster sales after the success of Avatar, James Cameron's 3-D epic. Cinemas charge about $3 more per ticket for a 3-D film.

Brooklyn's Finest opened in second place with $13.5 million. The drama follows three cops, played by Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, and Ethan Hawke, and a drug dealer portrayed by Wesley Snipes.

Shutter Island, last week's No. 1 film, fell to third with sales of $13.3 million. The movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a detective investigating an insane asylum, has taken in $95.8 million since its Feb. 19 release.

The rock band

Phish

plans to release a 3-D concert film in U.S. theaters next month, following

U2

and Walt Disney Co.'s

Hannah Montana

in trying to capitalize on the popularity of the format.

Phish 3D follows the band during its Festival 8 concerts in California in October. Concert films in 3-D have yielded mixed results. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Concert, released in February 2008, generated $70.6 million worldwide; U2 3D, released three weeks earlier, took in $22.3 million.

Brad Paisley

is recovering after he tripped during a concert in Charleston, S.C. The country star was singing his encore finale, "Alcohol," when he fell Saturday night, but he got back up and finished his show. He was checked out at a Charleston hospital and released early yesterday.

Paisley, 37, suffered only bad bruises, but he wrote on his Twitter page that he "hit hard. And I mean freaking hard." Paisley was performing to promote his latest album, American Saturday Night.

Singer, songwriter, and political activist

Bob Geldof

said a BBC report was without foundation in asserting that most of the aid raised by his Band Aid venture in the mid-1980s for Ethiopia was diverted for military use by rebel forces. There is "not a shred of evidence" that any of Band Aid's money was diverted, and "not a single penny" was spent on arms, Geldof said in a televised BBC interview yesterday.