User blog:Ceauntay/The Weekend Warrior: April 22 - 24, 2011

Greetings and welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly guide to the weekend's new movies. Tune in every Tuesday for the latest look at the upcoming weekend, and then check back on Thursday night for final projections based on actual theatre counts.

If you aren't doing so already, you can follow The Weekend Warrior on Twitter where he talks about box office, movies, music, comic books and all sorts of random things.

Updated Predictions and Comparisons -

1. Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family (Lionsgate) - $34.0 million N/A (up .7 million)

2. Rio (20th Century Fox) - $25.5 million N/A -35% (same)

3. Water for Elephants (20th Century Fox) - $16.3 million N/A (up 2.1 million)

4. Scooby-Doo! The Movie (Warner Bros.) - $10.0 million -60% (same)

5. Scream 4 (Dimension Films) - $9.0 million -52% (down .2 million)

6. Hop (Universal) - $8.0 million -25% (up .4 million)

7. African Cats (Disneynature) - $6.3 million N/A (same)

8. Insidious (FilmDistrict) - $5.1 million -24% (same)

9. Soul Surfer (FilmDistrict) - $5.0 million -31% (same)

10. Hanna (Focus Features) - $4.5 million -38% (same)

Weekend Overview

It's Easter weekend, falling a bit later in the year than normal, but three movies will try to keep the momentum from Rio's big opening last week with Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family (Lionsgate) continuing the Atlanta media mogul's successful run of comedies starring his popular cross-dressing granny. As we've seen in the past, actually putting "Madea" in the title tends to bring in a lot more of Perry's fans than his movies might otherwise, this one following just two years after Madea Goes to Jail opened with $40 million. Last year, Perry's sequel Why Did I Get Married Too? opened over Easter with $29 million, but with this one being marketed as a straight comedy, we expect this one to do even better, providing Perry with his second-biggest opening to date.

Reese Witherspoon and "Twilight" star Robert Pattinson come together for the adaptation of Sara Gruen's 2006 novel Water for Elephants (20th Century Fox), a historic romance that will try to bring in the female fans of both stars from teenagers to older women. It should benefit from the Good Friday holiday to help it bring in some business, although being a period piece with a generally dour premise and weaker marketing will keep it from breaking out in any significant way. Third place is a lock, but we'll have to see if this week's promotional blitz with both actors doing interviews and talk shows helps push the movie into the teens or higher territory.

For a third year in a row, Disneynature is releasing a nature doc in time for Earth Day on Friday and while African Cats may benefit greatly from opening on Good Friday, a day with no school, it may be hindered by the stronger animated family movies in theaters and not having the classroom groups to help bolster its opening weekend. The cougars with cubs that don't go see Water for Elephants (see what I did there?) may go see this with their kids instead.

With school out on Friday and some people off work on Monday, the returning movies should be able to capitalize on the fact that the three new movies have a very specific non-competitive target audience, which should allow movies like Wes Craven's Scream 4 to hold up a bit better than it might normally while Universal's Hop should benefit greatly from its Easter themes with a big bump on Good Friday.

This week's "Chosen One" is Denis Villeneuve's Incendies (Sony Pictures Classics) with an "Honorable Mention" to Morgan Spurlock's POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Sony Pictures Classics); you can read about both below.

Also, the 10th Annual Tribeca Film Festival starts in New York on Wednesday, which you can read more about (and enter our contest) here

This weekend last year saw the release of three new movies, but in one of the biggest shockers of the month, DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon moved back up the ranks into first place in its fifth week with $15.3 million and $178 million total. Jennifer Lopez returned in the maternity comedy The Back-up Plan (CBS Films), which did a disappointing $12.2 million in over 3,200 theaters for second place, but it fared better than the Joel Silver-produced action flick The Losers (Warner Bros.), which opened in fourth place with $9.4 million. Disneynature's 2010 Earth Day release Oceans opened on Wednesday and it added another $6 million over the weekend for eighth place. With the Top 10 grossing less than $86 million that weekend, there's a good chance that the Easter weekend this year will help make this the second weekend in a row up from last year!