2, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Moreover, the film surpassed Batman Forever to achieve the largest opening weekend for a Jim Carrey film. How the Grinch Sole Christmas had the biggest opening weekend for a Ron Howard film, smashing the previous record held by Ransom. It was the first non-Disney film to win the Thanksgiving weekend box office since Mrs. Doubtfire in 1993. It held the record for the highest opening weekend for a Christmas-themed film for 18 years, until the 2018 film version of The Grinch surpassed it with $67.6 million. In its second weekend, the film grossed $52.1 million, dropping only 5.1%, setting a new record for highest-grossing second weekend for any film at the time, beating The Phantom Menace. It stayed at the top of the box office for four weekends until it was overtaken by What Women Want and Dude, Where's My Car? in mid-December. How the Grinch Stole Christmas continued to draw holiday crowds while defeating another family-oriented film, The Emperor's New Groove. By this point, it surpassed Mission: Impossible 2 to become the year's top-grossing film. The film closed on March 1, 2001, with a final domestic gross of $260,044,825. Box Office Mojo estimates that it sold over 48.1 million tickets in North America. Critical response On Rotten Tomatoes, How the Grinch Stole Christmas holds an approval rating of based on reviews and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, "Jim Carrey shines as the Grinch. Unfortunately, it's not enough to save this movie. You'd be better off watching the TV cartoon." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 46 out of 100 based on 29 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars, referring to it as "a dank, eerie, weird movie about a sour creature" and said, "There should be ... a jollier production design and a brighter look overall ... It's just not much fun." Ebert observed that Carrey "works as hard as an actor has ever worked in a movie, to small avail". Nevertheless, he decided that "adults may appreciate Carrey's remarkable performance in an intellectual sort of way and give him points for what was obviously a supreme