‘Polar Express’ appears on track

After a slow start out of the station, “The Polar Express” just keeps chugging along.

The holiday movie took in nearly $10 million over the past weekend, lifting its domestic total to $110 million with plenty of steam left for Christmas and New Year’s.

Add in overseas box-office potential, plus its prospects as a holiday perennial on television and video, and it now has a solid shot to earn back its enormous production and marketing costs.

A month ago, “The Polar Express” looked like it could be a train wreck. It debuted with $30.6 million in its first five days, an unremarkable start given the movie’s $170 million production cost and the luster of star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis.

“Our best play time is in front of us,” said Dan Fellman, Warner Bros. head of distribution. “We realized the advantage for us was to get as much play time as we could prior to Christmas, because we always felt our movie, which had fabulous word of mouth, would grow as we got closer to Christmas.”

Adapted from Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book, “The Polar Express” follows a doubting boy as he regains his faith in the spirit of Christmas during a magical train trip to the North Pole.

The movie was created through “performance-capture” technology, with Hanks and other actors going through the motions on a bare soundstage. Their movements were recorded by infrared sensors, then re-created in digital imagery that resembles the computer animation of “Shrek 2” or “The Incredibles.”

The technology allowed for semirealistic renderings of its human characters, which include Hanks in multiple roles including the boy, the train conductor and Santa Claus.

Reviews were wildly mixed, with some critics calling the film an instant Christmas classic and others saying the human figures resembled lifeless zombies.