By Chris Kavan - 04/25/11 at 02:22 AM CT
Although the competition had some fight in them, the animated Rio held on to its #1 spot over the Easter weekend.
With a hefty amount of 3D screens helping out, Rio made $26.8 million - 57% coming from said 3D screenings. The animated bird, while falling short of last years How to Train Your Dragon is doing better than both Rango and Hop in the same time frame with a $81.3 million total (compared to $68 million for the other two).
Tyler Perry's newest film, Madea's Big Happy Family, came in 2nd with $25.8 million, nipping right on the heels of Rio. While it did open better than Meet the Brown's $20.1 million, it was on the low end compared to previous Madea films. Not surprisingly the film's audience was mostly black, making up 81% of the audience.
Coming in third was the romantic drama Water for Elephants. The Robert Pattinson / Reece Witherspoon pairing managed $17.5 million. Once again, it was a bit on the low end for this kind of film drawing a mostly female and slightly older audience.
Thanks to an Easter theme, Hop managed to increase its attendance from last week. A 16.3% increase helped it to a 4th place $12.4 million total and it also became the third film to cross the $100 million mark this year.
Meanwhile, Scream 4 had the biggest drop from last week. Typical for a horror film, the 62% drop was still steep, especially for the established franchise. The $7.2 million 5th-place showing raised its total to a disappointing $31.2 million.
The weeks only other new release was the Disneynature film African Cats, which opened 6th with $6.4 million. It was on par with the previous films in the series.
All films rounding out the top 10 held up well, with all dropping less than 30% attendance. The low-budget horror Insidious and the sci-fi Source Code should both near $50 million before their runs are over.
Next week Vin Diesel and the whole gang are back for Fast Five, the High School Musical crowd can find solace in Prom and Brandon Routh plays a different hero in Dylan Dog: Dead of Night.
