Weekend Box-Office: April 22-24, 2011

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Birds
beat Tyler Perry by a smidgen…

Despite another massive
opening by a Tyler Perry movie, it was the animated birds in RIO
that managed to squeeze out the #1 spot at the box-office this
weekend, with close to $27M in grosses, which was only 30% less
than last weekend’s take. RIO has now grossed $81M in the first 10
days of its release in North America, and another $205M around the
world, giving it a grand total of $286M already! That makes RIO
the highest
worldwide grossing movie of 2011!
The film in 2nd place overall is another animated film, RANGO.

Tyler Perry’s latest MADEA
movie also managed a very strong showing in its first weekend of
release, but wasn’t his biggest opening of all-time (that would be
MADEA GOES TO JAIL in 2009 with $41M). I’m just amazed that this
was Perry’s 10th film release in the past 7 years! This dude is
putting Woody Allen to shame! That said, unlike the Wood-man,
Perry’s films actually gross a lot of money — especially
during their opening weekends — but have never surpassed the
$100M mark (the closest one was MADEA GOES TO JAIL with $91M).
Considering that Perry’s films are shot on very low budgets, I’m
thinking this trend will continue for some time to come, or at
least until the “quality” of his films starts to
decrease (a la Woody Allen). Here’s a list of all of Tyler Perry’s
releases since 2005, along with their total and opening grosses:

MADEA’S
BIG HAPPY FAMILY (2011): $28M (opening)
WHY DID I GET MARRIED TOO? (2010): $61M (total), $29M (opening)
I CAN DO BAD ALL BY MYSELF (2009): $52M (total), $23M (opening)
MADEA GOES TO JAIL (2009): $91M
(total), $41M (opening)
THE FAMILY THAT PREYS (2008): $37M (total), $17M (opening)
MEET THE BROWNS (2008): $42M (total), $20M (opening)
WHY DID I GET MARRIED? (2007): $55M
(total), $21M (opening)
DADDY’S LITTLE GIRLS (2007): $31M (total), $11M (opening)
MADEA’S FAMILY REUNION (2006): $63M (total),
$30M (opening)
DIARY OF A BLACK WOMAN (2005): $51M
(total), $22M (opening)

The other “new film” of the weekend,
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, also opened fairly decently with a 3rd place
showing and about $18M. Your guess is as good as mine in terms of
what percentage of that total was made up of tweens just wanting
to check out Robert Pattinson. HOP also managed to actually raise
its weekend total compared to last weekend, by about 16%, surely
having to do with the Easter weekend. In the same vein, last
week’s #2 movie, SCREAM 4, lost a massive amount of its audience
from last weekend (61%, in fact) and dropped into 5th place. The
other horror movie in the top 10, INSIDIOUS, continued to hang
around the top 10 for yet another weekend though, as it raised its
total to $45M in its fourth week of release.

The 3 films to get booted from the top 10 this
weekend including LIMITLESS ($74M), ARTHUR ($29M) and YOUR
HIGHNESS ($20M). The 2 latter films can be considered
“disappointments” when compared to their respective
budgets of $40M for ARTHUR and $50M for YOUR HIGHNESS. LIMITLESS
only cost $27M to make and is considered an early “hit”
of the year.

Next week sees the release of 3 new movies,
including what may be the first “summer movie” of the
year in FAST
FIVE, which starts the “summer movie season” off one
weekend early this year with everyone on board including Vin
Diesel, Michelle
Rodriguez, Paul Walker, the Rock, Jordana
Brewster and plenty of cars. The other film being released is
from Disney and called PROM,
while the Weinstein Company has decided that releasing a sequel to
HOOKWINKED
was apparently a good idea. So how much money do you think FAST
FIVE will open with next weekend? VOTE
HERE!!!