As you impatiently listen to the clock tick off the seconds until your Thanksgiving holiday, distract yourself from your daydreams of stuffing and candied yams with a look at the weekend's box office numbers:

1. Beowulf - $28.1 million
That Beowulf's opening weekend finished more than $40 million behind the blockbuster debut of 300 confirms what we'd already suspected: that a single, CGI-sculpted Ray Winstone sixpack, even when supplemented by a gilded, digitally bazoomed Angelina Jolie, simply cannot compete with an entire battalion's worth of glistening Spartan washboards. The next time director Robert Zemeckis decides to break out his motion-capture technology, he may want to find a few hundred more doughy English actors onto which he can impose abdominal perfection.

2. Bee Movie - $14.3 million
Once Jerry Seinfeld's risky foray into the feature world passes the coveted nine-figure box office milestone this coming weekend, expect the vindicated comedian to take out a full-page ad in the trades trumpeting the accomplishment, in which Seinfeld, again donning his Cannes bee suit, extends a defiant middle finger towards the reader over a headline declaring: "I TOOK A JOKE I TOLD SPIELBERG OVER DINNER AND MADE $100 MILLION WITH IT. SUCK IT, HOLLYWOOD. I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO PROVE TO YOU."

3. American Gangster - $13.218 million
The next step in Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington's on-screen partnership will be, we hope, a buddy comedy. Dare we dream that someone (read: Brian Grazer) can find a way to put them into a remake of Lethal Weapon or 48 Hours?

4. Fred Claus - $12 million
Vince Vaughn is said to be very interested in working with Beowulf's Robert Zemeckis on a future project, intrigued that the director's lazy-actor-slimming technology might allow him to once again revert to his The Break-Up weight without suffering any career consequences.

5. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium - $10.025 million
Unfortunately for Fox, the irresistible smell of cake they'd hoped would linger in potential ticket-buyers' olfactory memories for months seems to have long faded, resulting in a weak opening for their whimsical family film.

• Weekend Box Office November 16-18, 2007 [Box Office Mojo]

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