Tyler Perry's Madea had the US box office in the palm of her large meaty hand this weekend, as the latest in his church-group-friendly franchise, Madea Goes To Jail, thoroughly outperformed the weekend's expected winner, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, thus proving definitively that Baptists are bigger filmgoers than tweenies.
Madea Goes To Jail, written & directed by and starring Perry as the larger-than-life Madea, who this time gets sent to jail for speeding and finds herself mentoring a young prostitute / former drug addict. Now in its second weekend, the film took $16.5m for a total of $64.9 million since release.
The Jonas Brothers, in contrast, managed only $12.7 million over the weekend, despite the much-hyped 3D-osity of their concert movie. While we're tempted to say that it serves them right for stealing the excellent Coraline's 3D capable screens (that fell to 7th place with $5.3 million), we'll content ourselves with noting that the mop-haired 'rockers' fell far behind the Hannah Montana 3D concert movie of last year, which had an opening of $31.1 million. That said, that earlier film showed no legs at all, so perhaps the Jonas Brothers will do better over time.
Other exciting news saw Slumdog Millionaire get a big Oscar bump: it's up a whopping 44.9% from last week with $12.2 million, and worldwide is nearing the $200 million mark, a fantastic result by anyone's standards. It's also the biggest Oscar-bump since Titanic - so maybe it'll hang around long enough to do a billion dollars!*
The Reader also got an Oscar bump, going up 10% on last week, as did Milk with a 37% improvement. Elsewhere in the charts, new release Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun L****i managed a could-be-worse-just-about $4.7 million and took 8th place.
For the full rundown of this week's winners and losers, head on over to Box Office Mojo.
*Hey, we can dream!