The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn might have held onto the #1 slot during the Thanksgiving frame, but holiday buzz lifted those plucky Muppets to a strong second place showing; with $24.7 million over three days, Jason Segel, Kermit, and Co. should ride the Rainbow Connection all the way to a very nice pile of green by weekend's end. Meanwhile, Happy Feet Two continues to slide and Aardman Animation's fellow wintry offering Arthur Christmas opened with a modest $4.5 million Friday. Martin Scorsese's 3-D fall family flick Hugo, on the other hand, enjoyed a strong debut on a fraction of the screens. Maybe audiences weren't quite ready to ring in the yuletide cheer?
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Lots of movie business to tweet about this weekend: Breaking Dawn, Part I made more money than is right for our national health, The Descendants scored a great opening in limited release, Happy Feet Two happened, and everyone is pretending to know who Natalie Wood is. Time to narrow down Twitter's commentary to five of the weekend's best movie-related quips. Robert Wagner, you are not culpable for the hilarity herein.
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The Twilight Saga sparkled to another #1 opening, as if you had any doubt; it was just a matter of how many millions Breaking Dawn would rake in, after Friday's $72 million opening day. But while all the excitement over weddings, butter-colored honeymoons, and monster vampire babies couldn't quite help BD eclipse New Moon (groan), it still nudged out Pirates of the Caribbean: The One with the Kraken for the #5 biggest opening of all time. That's forever, baby. Let's get our imprinting on in today's Weekend Receipts.
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In this weekend's Happy Feet Two, Robin Williams voices Ramón, a South American penguin lothario, and Lovelace, a deep-voiced love guru. So how did a self-described quiet child from Chicago transform himself into one of Hollywood's most energetic Academy Award winners and skilled impressionists, who pulls double duty in Warner Bros.'s latest animated feature?
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Australian director George Miller's Happy Feet was one of the surprise pleasures of the 2006 moviegoing year. The story was simple: A young Emperor penguin who has no skill for singing, a necessary skill in wooing a mate, discovers instead that he has a flair for dancing. The picture was fanciful and breezy and, particularly for a big-budget animation feature, showed a wonderful lightness of touch. And it didn't hurt that Savion Glover choreographed the dance moves of the main character, a chubby, awkward-elegant little guy named Mumble, voiced by Elijah Wood.
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