Matt Reeves' sci-fi film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes tops the box office weekend with $73 million in the U.S and Canada.

According to Daily Mail, the movie scored one of summer's best debuts. This film also surpassed the $54.8 million opening to the 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The motion-capture performance of the film's lead ape, Caesar (Andy Serkis) was greatly appreciated by moviegoers and critics. In the movie, Caesar's tribe encounters a community of surviving human beings on a planet ruled by intelligent apes. Chris Aronson, the head of distribution at Fox Studios said that, "When you get the kind of reviews we got and the audience actually agrees, it's the kind of rare thing where critics and audiences come together and say this is a great movie."

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L.A. Times reported that the Twentieth Century Fox's latest film cost $170 million to produce. This makes it the first studio to cross the billion-dollar mark in box-office sales for the U.S. and Canada this year. The studio's tally this year is at the $1.015 billion mark.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes succeeded in pushing the blockbuster hit Transformers: Age of Extinction into second place.