The domestic box office was a race between two computer-generated creatures this weekend, as “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “The Call of the Wild” jockeyed for first place.

Paramount Pictures’s “Hedgehog,” an action-comedy with a blue, fur-covered digital protagonist, had an impressive opening last weekend, and it was expected to hold its lead. While the movie did top the box office this weekend — with an estimated $26.3 million in domestic sales Friday through Sunday — it was a closer contest than expected.

That was thanks to a surprisingly good showing from the second-place movie: “The Call of the Wild,” an adaptation of the Jack London novel that pairs a scruffy Harrison Ford with a digital Bernard-Scotch shepherd mix. Distributed by 20th Century Studios, the film opened to an estimated $24.8 million in domestic sales this weekend. That figure is above expectations (prerelease projections had placed it in the teens), though because of the movie’s reported $135 million budget, it has a long way to go to be profitable.

“The Call of the Wild,” directed by Chris Sanders, has a recognizable leading man in Ford, who plays the novel’s central human, a rugged outdoorsman. But like the novel, the movie is primarily the story of Buck, a California house dog that finds its way into the wild. This version's fully digital canine received a fair amount of online mockery — though perhaps not as much as the digital title character of “Sonic the Hedgehog,” which was redesigned after audiences ridiculed its appearance in an early trailer.