Niiice ... Borat is Biggest Small Film in Us Ever

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest incarnation Borat became the biggest small film ever released in north America, taking $26.4m (£14m) at the box office.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which features Baron Cohen's cod Kazakh TV journalist travelling across the US in search of cultural enlightenment and Pamela Anderson, also topped the UK box office for the weekend.

Borat thus shoves aside Fahrenheit 9/11 by documentary-maker Michael Moore, another man prone to pulling confrontational stunts on film, to take the record for a film opening at fewer than 1,000 cinemas. Fahrenheit 9/11, which went on to take more than $220m at the box office worldwide, had an opening weekend take of $23.9m in 2004.

The studio behind Borat, 20th Century Fox, had predicted an opening weekend take of around $15m.

While there had been much early enthusiasm for the film following festival screenings, there were fears that the appetite for a bumbling anti-Semitic, pro-incest fake Kazakh who engages in an extended bout of vigorous nude wrestling with his producer might not be mainstream enough to translate to the box office.

Accordingly Fox reduced the number of opening weekend cinemas for Borat, calculating that the film would work better in fewer, more crowded cinemas. The strategy seemed to work.

"This picture was playing to full houses," said Bruce Snyder, Fox's head of distribution. "The planets aligned, the moons aligned, the stars aligned, and everything came together perfectly for us on this weekend."