Brad Pitt was celebrating as his new war movie Fury closed out the London Film Festival on Sunday (19Oct14) - it also charged to the top of the U.S. box office.

The gritty film about a defiant World War Two tank commander and his crew, debuted at number one with an opening weekend haul of $23.5 million (Gbp14.6 million).

Thriller Gone Girl dropped to two after spending two weeks at the top and new animated movie The Book of Life charted at three.

Closing the London Film Festival with Fury, Pitt said he hoped his new film was respectful to the soldiers who fought in World War Two.

He explained, "Our wish is the soldiers themselves feel they were respectfully recognised. War is hell. It is an amazing fact of human nature that one year we can be chopping each other up (and) the next we can be sharing a pint. We continually devolve into conflict, no matter how much we evolve."

And he revealed he enjoyed researching the period film at the same time his now-wife Angelina Jolie was preparing to make her prisoner-of-war drama Unbroken: "It was a lovely experience, we don't normally work at the same time. I was studying the European theatre (of war), she was studying the Pacific theatre. I was studying tanks, she was studying bombers."