"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" was the top U.S. and Canadian film over the holiday weekend, taking in $26.5 million for Paramount Pictures as Hollywood prepared to close out a second year of falling sales.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” from Sony Corp., was fourth with $13 million in its debut, Hollywood.com’s box-office unit said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin” was fifth with $9.13 million. Sales at U.S. and Canadian cinemas this year have fallen 4.5 percent to $9.9 billion, the film researcher said.

End-of-year films, which also include a new Sherlock Holmes movie and Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” failed to generate enough business to erase a drop from last year’s $10.6 billion in sales. Studios have struggled to attract audiences to a 2011 lineup filled with sequels and a record 36 movies in 3-D.

“You started off with an awful first quarter, and that was just a case of bad content,” said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Wedge Partners Group, an independent equity-analysis group based in Greenwood Village, Colorado.

“‘Green Hornet’ was the biggest example,” he said. “The other problem was during the summer, you just had a lot of crowding of good films that just couldn’t get enough breathing room.”

In “Ghost Protocol,” the fourth “Mission Impossible” film, Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, leader of an elite special-operations squad that takes on the government’s most difficult assignments.