Friday's Box Office - WFE is #3 with 7M

Deadline Reports Friday's Box Office - WFE is #3 with 7M

FRIDAY 6:30 PM: (No Easter Weekend estimates yet.) Twentieth Century Fox's Rio may be about a bird, but very early numbers show "it's holding like a rock," a studio exec just emailed me. Lionsgate's latest in Tyler Perry's franchise, Madea's Big Happy Family, looks soft. This is, after all, Perry's sixth cross-dressing film; the last one opened to $41M and the one before was $30M. But overperforming is Fox's intriguing for adults and Robert Pattinson's Twi-hards Water For Elephants based on Sara Gruen's best-selling book and written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Francis Lawrence. "Terrific start for Elephants as we could hit higher teens," a Fox exec tells me. It's also a good day for Universal's holdover Hop from Illumination Entertainment which will pop on Saturday and Sunday for the little bunnies and their parents. And Disneynature's African Cats narrated by Samuel Jackson is also playing strong for a nich nature movie. So it's not a bad Good Friday in more ways than one!
Refined numbers and full analysis coming later. Here are Top 5:

1. Rio 3D (Blue Sky Studio/Fox) Week 2 []
Friday $11M
2. Madea's Big Happy Family (Tyler Perry Studio/Lionsgate) NEW
Friday $10M
3. Water For Elephants (Fox 2000/Fox) NEW
Friday $7M
4. Hop (Illumination Entertainment/Universal) Week 3 []
Friday $5.5M
5. African Cats (Disneynature/Walt Disney Studios) NEW
Friday $3M
6. Scream 4 (Miramax/Dimension/Weinstein Co) Week 2
Friday $3M

SOURCE

i know I'm supposed to post this in the WFE archives but I thought this article deserves its separate post.
Hats off to the amazing movie and its amazing star cast ! Congratulations WFE!!

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The Hollywood Reporter: Water for Elephants Over performing

The surprise is Water for Elephants -- starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz -- which is overperforming in early business at the domestic box office.

(...)

Heading into the weekend, Fox 2000's Water for Elephants was projected to post an opening weekend gross of between $13 million to $15 million.

Water, based on the bestselling book by Sara Gruen, has been gaining momentum in recent days, particularly among younger females, and has every chance now of doing more business. The film's strongest demo, according to tracking, is older women.

SOURCE

it hasn't released in Australia yet, i cant wait till it does so i can watch it in cinemas