DreamWorks’ ‘Dragon’ Ingests $43.3M in First Weekend

Amazing. Just when you thought “Avatar” had sucked all the money out of the movie industry for the time being, DreamWorks Animation SKG’s computer-generated 3D spectacular “How to Train Your Dragon” comes up to the plate and smacks it out of the park with a huge $43.3-million first weekend.

As we have chronicled here at eWEEK, DreamWorks — which produces five movies every two years — worked closely with IT partner Hewlett-Packard on the project, as it has for several others, including the “Shrek” series, “Monsters & Aliens,” “Kung Fu Panda,” “Over the Hedge” and “Madagascar.” All were huge hits for the studio.

What is amazing from a storage point of view is this: When DreamWorks made the first “Shrek” movie in 2001, the final storage total was about 6TB. Every movie following that one has continued to get bigger: “Monsters & Aliens” took up 93TB of storage in 2009, and “How to Train Your Dragon” became the first movie to break into three tera-digits with just slightly above 100TB.

That’s more than most midrange data centers have in terms of capacity. It’s mind-blowing to think that an entire data center is needed to house these humongous 3D movies. Remember, there are two renderings for every 3D frame, plus the studio also stores a regular 2D master.

The data center simply becomes a giant storage farm — for one item. Wow.