#WFE is #3 with 7Mil ~ Deadline Reports Friday's Box Office

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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. 
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

Deadline| Via