MadeaGoesToJail Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It would be a shame if the stinging loss the Jonas Brothers suffered at the hands of fellow Disney Channel pop superstar Hannah Montana doesn't give those nice-looking boys an inferiority complex. Still, it's hard not to note how the $12 million debut for Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience compares to Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Tour's $31 million bow. Adding insult to injury, Hannah Montana managed the feat on just under 700 screens, while les freres Jonas had 1,300 to work with. I'm not too up on the trends in tween girl entertainment, so I invite analysis in the comments. I thought the Jonas Brothers were nearly as much of a sensation as Hannah/Miley.

The Jonases did kick the crap out of the aging, ailing Street Fighter franchise, the latest installment of which opened to a powerful $4.65 million (albeit on around 1200 screens). The best part is that, though Fox declined to screen the film for the press (junketeers excepted, natch), it scheduled midnight shows for the film around the country. I was required to attend last Thursday night, and I was one of five people in the theater. Interest in the film may have been wildly overestimated.

The whiffs from Jonas and Street Fighter (relative from Jonas; absolute from Street Fighter) allowed Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail another week atop the box office, despite the hefty 60% second weekend drop typical of the Perry franchise. With a total gross of nearly $65 million, Madea Goes to Jail is already the most lucrative Tyler Perry movie ever.

Tyler Perry is undeniably an enormous cash cow for Lionsgate. His films are inexpensive to produce (though no doubt Perry himself is commanding a steadily bigger paycheck with every film), and the least of them (the non-Madea-related Daddy's Little Girls) grossed $30 million; Madea's Family Reunion made upwards of $60. As a pure brand-name draw, I thought Perry might be fading a bit; his two 2008 offerings, one of which featured the profane, drag-tastic powerhouse Madea, both ended up toward the bottom of his filmography. Nothing doing. Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail made an eye-popping $41 million on a slow weekend, handily toppling the previous Perry opening record held by Family Reunion. Has there ever been another film (or set of films) with such niche popularity (in this case: African-American, Christian) but such minimal crossover appeal?

(By the way: I haven't seen any of Perry's films, but I find the photo that accompanies this post so inexplicably funny I'm almost tempted to go watch this one.)

Screen Gems' Fired Up!, the only other film to go wide this weekend (perhaps as part of a conspiracy to make people watch the Oscars) made $6 million and landed in 9th place, which actually isn't wretched for the cheap, low-expectations release.

The other notable story from the charts is Friday the 13th, which lost an awesome 81% of its opening-weekend gross and dropped from first place to sixth. Horror films with big openings are notoriously susceptible to big second-weekend drops, but 81% is almost unprecedented -- the only wide release this decade to suffer worse is the infamous Gigli. Among horror films, only Captivity (77% in 2007) came close.

Next week, we'll see what kind of "Oscar bump" Slumdog Millionare gets, but it doesn't need much help: with a slight screen count boost, it rose to #5 this weekend and is almost at $100 million.

The full top 10 after the jump.

Heaven help me, this Madea character is starting to grow on me. In Madea Goes to Jail, Tyler Perry's latest adaptation of one of his innumerable stage plays, his giant, pistol-packing alter ego finally runs afoul of the law one too many times and finds herself in the big house (not Big Momma's House, the big house). As a character, Madea felt randomly assembled in Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea's Family Reunion, but now Perry has grown her into a larger-than-life force of nature that is genuinely funny.

Madea Goes to Jail would be a lot better, in fact, if it were actually about Madea going to jail, or about Madea at all. But she's merely a supporting character in the film, which is really about a young lawyer and his shrewish fiancee dealing with elements from his past, with light Christian themes baked into the crust. In other words, it's more or less the same movie Perry has been making all along, with one-dimensional villains, catty women, and cringe-inducing melodrama. The addition of Rudy Huxtable as a crack whore certainly raises my interest level, though.

That'd be Keshia Knight Pulliam, who is 29 years old now, if you can believe that. She plays Candy, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks -- someone actually uses that figure of speech -- who's now hooked on the junk and turning tricks on the streets of Atlanta. Our dashing hero lawyer, Josh (Derek Luke), a prosecutor in the D.A.'s office, grew up in the same ghetto and is astonished to be reunited with her after she's arrested. But his purely platonic desire to help her is hampered by his wealthy fiancee, Linda (Ion Overman), who sees no reason to reach out to "those people" when it's Candy's own damn fault she's so messed up.

New Line insists on "reimagining," but from reading the reviews I take it nobody's buying.

Anyway. Friday the 13th set a horror remake opening weekend record, grossing $40.7 million over the three days and $45.2 including President's Day Monday. That beats Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake by more than $12 million. It's also roughly the second best President's Day weekend opening ever, behind only Ghost Rider and just about tied with 50 First Dates and Daredevil.

Confessions of a Shopaholic opened to a halfway decent $17.3 million, while The International more or less flopped with $10.7 million; the marketing for the latter really pushed the evil bank concept, complete with a shot of an ATM offering "murder" "corruption" and "extortion" as options instead of "withdrawal" "deposit" and "check balance." Maybe people thought it was a comedy.

It was another good weekend for holdovers, with Taken, Coraline and -- once again -- Paul Blart: Mall Cop all doing well. Taken's $81-million-and-counting is really remarkable. $120 million is assured at this point, with more possible. "Sleek, preposterous and breathlessly entertaining" appears to be a good formula. Meanwhile, maybe if I stop mentioning Paul Blart in these posts, it'll go away? Seems unlikely.

Leading up to the Oscars, Slumdog Millionare should be close to $100 million by the big night. The Reader also saw a late bump this weekend; a Kate Winslet win on Sunday can't hurt.

The full 4-day top 10 after the jump.

So very often, we here at Cinematical field comments that are directed specifically to whoever a post was about -- as if Star X or Director Y were reporting about themselves, or as if we hoard e-mail information for any given celebrity and pass word on with great frequency. Having written just one review, though, of a Tyler Perry movie, none of my other posts have yet to have so many remarks addressed directly to the writer-director-producer-star-caterer than that one.

Still, so long as Tyler Perry and his filmed plays are around, we'll have posters and trailers that demonstrate just how ungainly his blend of broad slapstick and gospel-laced melodrama is over the course of a mere two minutes, let alone two hours. Case in point: next February's Madea Goes to Jail. On the one hand, we have the poster (click below to enlarge), with the risible imagery of a dove made out of smoke framing the face of Madea (Perry in drag), a character known primarily for being racuous, shrill, anything but saintly. On the other, we have this trailer by way of Yahoo! Movies, which runs the gamut from Madea bickering with Dr. Phil and sticking it to noxious honkies to straight-up preaching to prostitutes in prison.

For some people, it's everything that they hope for out of a Tyler Perry offering. For others, it's everything that they dread. Madea Goes to Jail on Feburary 20th, and I just wanted you to know, Mr. Perry, that I'll try to find my own "Get Out of Jail Free" card by then.

Here's some more casting news, courtesy of Variety:

First up is twenty-something comedian Dan Levy. He has worked under Bill & Ted's Alex Winter in television's Dirty Famous, and on the big screen side of things, we're about to see him play "Snooty Man" in The House Bunny. Now, on top of acting alongside a scary-looking (in the film) Anna Faris, Levy has nabbed a role in Mardi Gras. This is one of those Maxim flicks -- the one that already stars West from Heroes. So, this probably won't help his career, but at least he gets to party.

In an entirely different vein, Boris Kodjoe is signing on for another science fiction role. He's already completed a stint in Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (I wish I was kidding), and now he's picked up a role in Disney's sci-fi thriller called The Surrogates. This is NOT that flick where unsuspecting would-be parents pick an insane surrogate, but rather, the one that just got a creepy set photo. There is no word on who he'll play in the robotic flick.

Finally, there's a new gig for one of the sexy ladies from Grindhouse. Vanessa Ferlito has picked up a much less gruesome role in Tyler Perry's latest -- Madea Goes to Jail. She gets to play some woman named Donna. But that's not all that we can see her in. She's also got a gig in Humboldt Park and Julie & Julia on the way.

Phew! For a second there, I thought there wasn't going to be any footage of Madea in this new trailer for Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns. But if you're at all familiar with Perry's play Meet the Browns, you know she's not actually featured in the story. So, why was I expecting her to show up in the trailer? Well, IMDb mentions that she's in the movie, which is reportedly very different than the play it's based on. Plus, it's been too long since fans have seen Madea. She's like Tyler Perry's Jay & Silent Bob. Even though she shouldn't be continually milked as a cash cow for Perry's career, it's not smart box-office-wise to let her go. Anyway, that shot of Madea at the head of a police chase may be a lead-in for Perry's eventual film version of Madea Goes to Jail, which he has announced is in the works.

In case you couldn't tell from the trailer, which seems to give every bit away, the plot of Meet the Browns follows the story of Brenda (Angela Bassett), a single mom living in Chicago with serious financial woes, who finds out her father, who she's never met, has just died. She heads to Georgia with her kids and meets her father's other family, The Browns, many of whom, such as Cora Brown (Tamela J. Mann), have starred in previous Perry movies. As we can definitely tell from the trailer, Brenda inherits a house, finds a man (Rick Fox), deals with her son's venture into dope dealing and has a grand time settling in with her new Southern family. Meet the Browns arrives in theaters March 21.

After asking Why Did I Get Married?, writer/director/actor Tyler Perry already has Meet the Browns and A Jazz Man's Blues cooking. But now he's adding two more to the list, and The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Lionsgate has nabbed both of them. The first up is The Family That Preys Together. I'm digging the play on words. (If confused, please look up "prey" and "pray.") Unfortunately, THR is saying absolutely nothing about that this specific production is about, other than that it will be a typical Perry feature: "humor, uplift, and unlimited heart and soul." Bah. I just want to know the plot.

The other feature will be Madea Goes to Jail. Now, you might be confused since Perry already has a video title for that, but that's a video of the theatrical play -- this will be a feature film based on it. For this project, the title explains it all -- his famous character, Madea, heads to jail, and the film will deal with what happens after she does. As per usual, Perry wrote both features, will direct them, and will act in both, playing a "major role" in Prey, and starring, of course, in Madea. This has worked well for Perry in the past -- Married opened at number one last month. I'm just wondering when the guy will burn out. He's done a ton of work since his directorial debut in 2002, and doesn't seem to be slowing down at all.