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"How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" breathed some fire into a slumping box office with a franchise-best $55.5 million debut over Oscar weekend. Writer-director Dean DeBlois' third and supposedly final installment in the "How to Train Your Dragon" series notched the best opening of the year in U.S. and Canadian theaters. Going into the weekend, overall ticket sales for 2019 were down 18 percent, according to Comscore, throwing cold water on the record box office of 2018. But as Hollywood was set to gather for the Academy Awards on Sunday, "The Hidden World" lent the industry some good news -- albeit not a hint at all of the magnitude of what that was in theaters last Oscar weekend when "Black Panther" was the top film. Made for $129 million, "The Hidden World" rode good reviews (91 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and warm audience reaction (an A CinemaScore) to exceed the $43.7 million opening of the 2010 original (which ultimately made $494.9 million worldwide) and the $49 million opening of the 2014 sequel (which amassed $621.5 million).

Alita: Battle Angel is an interesting and wild ride, jam-packed full of concepts around cybernetics, dystopian futures and cyberpunk themes. The film – in cinemas now – revolves around Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg (with original human brain) that is recovered by cybernetic doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and brought into the world of the future (the film is set in 2563). Hundreds of years after a catastrophic war, called "The Fall", the population of Earth now resides in a wealthy sky city called Zalem and a sprawling junkyard called Iron City where the detritus from Zalem is dumped. We follow Alita's story as she makes friends and enemies, and discovers more about her past. Her character is great – she has many of the mannerisms of a teenage girl combined with a determination and overarching sense of what is right – "I do not stand by in the presence of evil."

The new effects-driven science-fiction thriller "Alita: Battle Angel" stages a behind-the-scenes tussle for the ages: it is a collaboration between Robert Rodriguez, a filmmaker known for such neo-pulp action films as "From Dusk till Dawn" and "Sin City," and James Cameron, a filmmaker whose technological sophistication is matched by a simplistic emotionalism. Here they are thrown together in a virtual video ring and try to collaborate. And, however sincere and earnest their alliance may be, the movie itself tells a different tale: Cameron's sensibility wins, hands down. Not only does Rodriguez give up most of the fun, but Cameron also runs away with the substance. And that's all the more unfortunate, as the two are evenly matched early on in the film and the outcome of their efforts appears, at first, promising.