With a worldwide gross of over $880 million, this is Blue Sky Studios's and the Ice Age franchise's highest grossing film to date.
Buck warns the troupe, "Abandon hope, ye who enter there!" This is actually the famous line of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. It's said to be written on the gates of Hell.
At its peak, it was the 2nd highest grossing animated film of all time, right under Dreamworks Animation's Shrek 2 (2004).
This film and Ice Age (2002) are the only two films in the franchise to be nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Animated Film. Both also didn't win. They lost to Spirited Away (2001) and Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) respectively.
The characters of Buck (Simon Pegg ) and Rudy play out a story that is also found in "Moby Dick". Buck and Captain Ahab are both hunters, and both handicapped by a white animal that is so huge, as to strain belief. The white animals, named "Rudy" and "Moby Dick", managed to handicap Buck and Ahab, tearing away an eye and a leg, respectively. The result is that Buck and Ahab, instead of becoming afraid of Rudy and Moby, become obsessed with the quest to get revenge, hunting down the very beast that had hunted them. The fancy lines that Buck says when Rudy first appears sound like quotes from "Moby Dick", and the reference is never clearer than when Buck climbs to the very top of a spindly tree, above the cloud layer, holding a straight-ish branch like a spear, or actually posing like a harpooner ready to hurl a harpoon at Rudy, who is moving just below the layer's top just like a whale starting to breech the surface of the water. Buck is not going to do much to Rudy with a spindly stick, and his favorite weapon is the tooth-knife. The dinosaur tooth is the same color, size, and shape as a whale tooth. Rudy has been given his white color for many reasons, perhaps, but the similarity to Moby Dick is one strong reason. Captain Ahab's ship has a first mate named "Starbuck", another connection with "Buck". Finally, in both stories, Buck and Ahab are so obsessed with their hunt for their "enemy", that they abandon a choice of a more peaceful and sane life for their hunt.