Weekend Box Office (12/26/11): MI4 tops and War Horse makes strong Xmas day show as 10,000 movies get small piece of Christmas pie.

 Oh god, what a crowded and complicated weekend this was.  You had three major movies opening on Wednesday, one of which had been in IMAX release five days earlier and one had been racking up bucks all over Europe since October.  You had one major release on Friday and two biggies right on Christmas Day, plus a smattering of limited releases and wide expansions all throughout the weekend.  Topping the box office was the wide release of Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (review), which earned $29 million over the Friday-to-Sunday portion, with $61.3 million between the Wedneday-Monday six day wide opening.  Combined with five days of IMAX-exclusive grosses ($17 million), and the fourth entry in the franchise has a solid $78 million all-told.  Those aren't insane numbers, especially when you consider that the original Mission: Impossible grossed a then-record $74 million in six days way back in 1996 and the next two sequels did $91 million and $57 million (the latter off a normal non-holiday weekend) in their first six days, but Paramount knew it was sacrificing opening weekend might in exchange for long-term play-ability.  It should be noted that aside from a few outliers (Interview With the Vampire, Minority Report, and War of the Worlds) and the first three Mission: Impossible films, Cruise's opening weekends generally fall in the $25 million range, whereby they usually slowly crawl to $100-130 million.  So while the the pure $29 million Fri-Sun number is a bit below the prior M:I entries, it's actually at the high end of Cruise's opening weekend scale.