Rio speaks louder than Madea, repeats at No 1
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Anne Hathaway and Jake Eisenberg’s talking birds have edged out Tyler Perry’s sass-talking grandma at the weekend box office.
Hathaway and Eisenberg’s animated family adventure Rio took in $26.8 million to remain the No 1 movie for the second-straight weekend, according to studio estimates yesterday.
Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family debuted a close second with $25.8 million, another solid opening for writer-director Perry, who also stars as boisterous, opinionated grandma Madea.
Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson’s circus romance Water for Elephants premiered in third place with $17.5 million.
“It’s nice to have two movies in the top-three,” said Bert Livingston, distribution executive for 20th Century Fox, which released both Rio and Water for Elephants.
The weekend’s other new wide release, Disney’s nature documentary African Cats, opened at No 6 with $6.4 million.
Morgan Spurlock’s product-placement documentary POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold opened with fair but unremarkable business in limited release.
The latest from the maker of the hit documentary Super Size Me took in $135,139 in 18 theatres, averaging $7,508 a cinema. That compares to an $11,254 average in 2,288 theatres for Madea’s Big Happy Family, which had by far the best cinema average among the top-10 movies.
Hollywood scored its second-straight weekend of rising revenues, good news for studios that have been in a box-office slide since last fall.
Receipts totalled $138 million, up 39 per cent from the same weekend last year, when How to Train Your Dragon was No 1 with $15.4 million, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.
The upward trend likely will continue next weekend with Fast Five, the latest movie in The Fast and the Furious action franchise, expected to have a huge opening, said Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
“I think we’re going to have three up weekends in a row, and for us, that’s a roll. We’ve been down for so long,” Dergarabedian said. “It really points out how cyclical this business is.”
