Breaking Dawn Tops Thanksgiving Box Office

Despite several new releases hitting US cinemas over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend, Twilight: Breaking Dawn has topped the box office chart, adding another $62 million over the holiday. That takes its total to $221 million in North America and over $500 million worldwide in only 10 days.

While a holdover release topped the chart, it wasn’t all bad news for new releases. The Muppets took $42 million in its first five days, which certainly isn’t bad for a movie that only cost $45 million to make. With good word of mouth, it should do pretty well in the weeks to come as well.

Arthur Christmas had less to cheer about as it came in fourth with $17 million, behind animated competitor Happy Feet Two (which opened last week). The hope is that with its festive theme it’ll keep picking up family audiences over the next few weeks, although you would have thought that releasing it closer to Christmas would have made more sense.

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo came in fifth on the chart, but its $15 million was well ahead of the $11 million it had been expected to do in its first weekend. Paramount decided to role out the film relatively slowly, opening it on just over a thousand screens (compared to over 3000 for the week’s other main releases). Although the strong opening bodes well for the weeks to come, many will feel Paramount should have given the $150 million film a stronger push to begin with, as it’s timid approach could have lost it tens of million in potential box office.

Take a look below for the US box office for the weekend of November 25th-27th.

Rank	Title	Weekend Gross (millions)	Total Gross to date (millions)
1	The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1	$42.0	$221.3
2	The Muppets	$29.5	$42.0
3	Happy Feet Two	$13.4	$43.7
4	Arthur Christmas	$12.7	$17.0
5	Hugo	$11.3	$15.3
6	Jack And Jill	$10.3	$57.4
7	Immortals	$8.8	$68.6
8	Puss In Boots	$7.4	$135.3
9	Tower Heist	$7.3	$65.3
10	The Descendants	$7.2	$10.7

General movie news courtesy of Movie Muser