Fast And Furious 5 (or Fast Five ) well and truly took the lead at the US box office this weekend.
Opening with an impressive $83m, the high octane car chase/heist movie also managed to break the record for the biggest opening in the month of April ever. Not bad for a fourth sequel.
Which should please the film’s producers, who’ve already been taking about taking the franchise in a less car-heavy and more heist-flavoured direction with future instalments.
The fivequel’s success is most clear when you compare its numbers to the rest of the week’s box office big hitters, with Rio in number two with a tiny-in-comparison taking of $14.4m. In third was Madea’s Big Happy Family ($10m), fourth Water For Elephants ($9.1m) and Prom in fifth with $5m.
Other sequel Hoodwinked Too! came off considerably worse, opening with a miserable $4.1m in sixth place.
Meanwhile, Soul Surfer c ruised on into seventh ($3.3m), Insidious continued to scare the bejeesus out of people in eighth ($2.6m), Hop took $2.5m in ninth and Source Code continued a slow and steady run in tenth with $2.5m.