In times of hardship, people always turn to entertainment for comfort, for a slice of fantasy to compensate for a reality that takes a lot of effort to cope with.

Nowadays, with the economic crisis hovering over everyone’s head, the only way out, even for a while, is actually going out to a movie as a means to escape all the dark thoughts and all the trouble that has been constantly haunting the holidays.

This is probably why the new movies that were released this end of the year have managed to draw record numbers of people in theaters across North America, also coming into some pretty good debut earnings.

The story that attracted the largest number of movie-goers was “Marley&Me,” which sold an estimated $37 million worth of tickets within the three-day week-end that began on Friday, according to a Sunday statement released by distribution company 20^th Century Fox.

Starring Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, the aforementioned production, a movie about “love, life and family,” as Fox senior vice president of domestic distribution Bert Livingston has described it, revolves around the life lessons a family learns from their sweet, but neurotic Labrador.

When „Marley&Me” opened on Thursday, it made $14.7 million at the box office, which translates as a Christmas day record.

Other movies that managed to draw a crowd in United States theaters these recent days were „Bedtime Stories,” starring Adam Sandler, and „The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

On the whole, Christmas Day sales amounted to $75 million, as tracking firm Media By Numbers has informed, which represents an increase by approximately $10 million from last year.