'Rio' soars during strong weekend at the box office

By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY

Two high-profile movies helped push the box office to one of its strongest weekends of the year, led by Rio's blue Macaw.

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  Blue Sky Studios, Twentieth Century Fox

  Rio's animated birds earned $40 million at the box office this weekend.

Blue Sky Studios, Twentieth Century Fox

Rio's animated birds earned $40 million at the box office this weekend.

The animated comedy did $40 million, according to studio estimates from box-office tracking firm Hollywood.com.

The debut was $10 million more than many analysts projected and was plenty to defeat Scream 4, which didn't generate as many shrieks as expected.

Rio, featuring the voices of Jessie Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway and Tracy Jordan, earned solid reviews, garnering recommendations from 71% of the nation's film critics, according to survey site RottenTomatoes.com. According to movie pollsters CinemaScore, audiences gave the movie an A.

Scream 4 wasn't as well-received. The sequel did $19.3 million, about $2 million below expectations.

"Evidently the Scream franchise was played out long ago," Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo says of the series, which began in 1996.

But a sluggish opening weekend may not doom the $40 million movie, says Tim Briody of BoxOfficeProphets.com.

"This will likely build the audience for future films," he says. "The current target audience was in diapers when Scream was released, after all."

Hop, the animated Easter comedy, took third place with $11.2 million. The Russell Brand cartoon has earned $82.6 million in three weeks.

The family film Soul Surfer was fourth with $7.4 million, followed by the action film Hanna with $7.3 million.

Ticket sales were up 17% over the same weekend last year.

Final figures are due Monday.

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