And the Box Office Champion this week is...

Via Deadline Hollywood / Nikki Finke

SATURDAY PM/SUNDAY AM, 5TH UPDATE: Studios tell me this Easter Weekend began and ended with rain and storms in 2/3s of the U.S. and the first huge "up" weekend of $125M, which is +34% from last year. Twentieth Century Fox's Rio 3D may be about a bird, but Friday and Saturday numbers showed "it's holding like a rock," a studio exec emailed me.

Lionsgate's latest in Tyler Perry's franchise, Madea's Big Happy Family, had the best per screen average of all the top-grossing pictures. This is, after all, Perry's sixth cross-dressing film; still, the last one opened to a $41M weekend and the one before to $30M and this will be even lower by end of day Sunday. scoring an "A-" CinemaScore was Fox 2000's Water For Elephants based on Sara Gruen's best-selling book and written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Francis Lawrence.

Clearly, the classy ad campaign was intriguing for adults who don't rush out to see films, and for Robert Pattinson's Twi-hards who do. But this beautifully filmed but searing drama was considered a hard sell. It was also a fine weekend for Universal's holdover Hop from Illumination Entertainment after passing $100M. And Disneynature's African Cats narrated by Samuel Jackson played well for a niche nature movie that truly deserves to be seen, as evidenced by its "A-" CinemaScore. Full analysis coming. Here is the Top 10:

1. Rio 3D (Blue Sky Studio/Fox) Week 2 [3,842 Theaters]
Friday $10.6M, Saturday $10M, Easter Weekend $26.6M (-32%), Cume $81.1M

2. Madea's Big Happy Family (Tyler Perry/Lionsgate) NEW [2,288 Theaters]
Friday $10.5M, Saturday $9.1M, Easter Weekend $25.7M

3. Water For Elephants (Fox 2000/Fox) NEW [2,817 Theaters]
Friday $7M, Saturday $6.5M, Easter Weekend $17.5M

4. Hop (Illumination Entertainment/Universal) Week 4 [3,616 Theaters]
Friday $4.8M, Saturday $4.5M, Easter Weekend $12.4M, Cume $100.4M

5. Scream 4 (Miramax/Dimension/Weinstein Co) Week 2 [3,314 Theaters]
Friday $2.7M, Saturday $2.7M, Easter Weekend $7.1M (-62%), Cume $31.1M

6. African Cats (Disneynature/Walt Disney Studios) NEW [1,220 Theaters]
Friday $3.3M, Saturday $1.6M, Easter Weekend $6.4M

7. Soul Surfer (FilmDistrict/Sony) Week 3 [2,240 Theaters]]
Friday $2.3M, Saturday $1.9M, Easter Weekend $5.6M, Cume $28.6M

8. Insidious (FilmDistrict) Week 4 [2,130 Theaters]
Friday $2.1M, Saturday $1.9M, Easter Weekend $5.3M, Cume $44.1M

9. Hanna (Focus Features) Week 3 [2,383 theaters]
Friday $1.8M, Saturday $2M, Easter Weekend $5.2M, Cume $31.7M

10. Source Code (Summit) Week 4 [2,363 Theaters]
Friday $1.8M, Saturday $1.9M, Easter Weekend $5M, Estimated Cume $44.6M