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As expected, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was the top performer for December 21, 2011. The Brad Bird film (Brad, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Call me!) spikes huge from $1.69 million on Tuesday to $8.92 million on Wednesday. When your movie increases by a factor of five from the previous day, you must be living right. Well, it’s that or the fact that after being IMAX-exclusive for five days, the fourth Mission: Impossible movie expanded into 3,448 locations yesterday. Tom Cruise’s first hit in a loooooong time stands at $26.0 million after six days in theaters and this is a number I would ask you to keep in mind as our discussion evolves over the next week and a half. Really, this is the crux of the conversation.

The other noteworthy release yesterday is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Hollywood remake of the Swedish movie based upon the global bestseller by Stieg Larsson. After earning a respectable $1.5 million from midnight exhibitions on Tuesday, David Fincher’s latest movie accumulated another $3.6 million yesterday. We will use the $3.6 million tally as a baseline for its future results but what matters at the moment is that the well-relieved $100 million production is off to a modest start. This will be a perfect film to track over the holidays as it continues to increase rather than decline in box office. Such is the expected behavior of movies during the Twelve Days of Box Office.

What will happen with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that they will continue to earn a similarly impressive total each day from now until New Year’s Day. This is how the December holiday season box office works. I will circle back to the last time we had this particular calendar configuration, 2005, to demonstrate. There were two major releases that year and they battled for number one from December 19, 2005 until January 1, 2006.

Peter Jackson’s flawed epic, King Kong, finished in first place five times while The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was champion seven times. That is as tightly contested a holiday race as is possible. There was even a quirky aspect where Narnia won on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day while King Kong usurped the throne on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. There has never been anything like this before or since.

The daily splits are what are particularly fascinating. On December 19, King Kong earned $5.6 million. It hovered within the same $800,000 range Tuesday-Thursday of that week before ascending to an average of $7.1 million over the Friday-Sunday weekend phase. The following week, its box office spiked to $12.0 million the day after Christmas before leveling to the $7.1-$7.9 million range on those weekdays. In other words, a film that earned $5.6 million on Monday the 19th was earning significantly more the following week. As we know, that is not the way box office behavior is supposed to work. We use the word depreciation for a reason.

The first Narnia movie’s splits are even more dramatic. After starting with $4.7 million and $4.9 million on Monday and Tuesday, the 19th and 20th, it earned between $8.8 and $9.2 million the following week’s Tuesday-Thursday. This is the quirky behavior demonstrated during Christmas week and we will examine in detail with all of the major movies currently in theatrical release.

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