Keep the morning blues at bay via the savory comforts of a matzoh, egg, and bacon breakfast sandwich, plus a generous helping of home-fried box office numbers:

1. The Forbidden Kingdom - $US20.9 million
Lionsgate's action picture starring venerable martial arts masters Jackie Chan and Jet Li (and newly minted Kung Fu superstar Michael "Who?" Angarano) may not have registered too highly on your own new-release radar. But its surprise #1 finish meant there was indeed an audience looking for a fresh spin on the increasingly hackneyed plots served up by the genre, and who simply couldn't get enough of this touching story of two dads, as deadly fisted as they are in love, trying to raise their troubled teenage son the best way they know how.

2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall - $US17.3 million
It outperformed the Apatow Pictures Group's previous two releases, but not even its ubiquitous Sharpie marketing campaign and an unobstructed view of Jason Segel's semi-chubby man-parts were enough to earn Sarah Marshall the kinds of Superbad and Knocked Up numbers responsible for ushering in Hollywood's Golden Age of the Paunchy, Lovelorn, Post-Adolescent Jew. Still, a respectable second-place finish hardly suggests genre-fatigue. Perhaps all that's needed to again crack the $US30 mil mark is to up the male-nudity ante, finally conquering Hollywood's long-standing cyclops taboo in a close-up sequence that involves a frantic Seth Rogen bending over to fish his wedding ring out of a shower drain.

3. Prom Night - $US9.1 million
Sony's re-envisioning of the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis slasher dropped 56% and two positions in its second week, but it hopefully performed strongly enough overall to convince the studio to give another Curtis effort from that year—the David Copperfield- and trannie-packed choo-choo classic Terror Train—the remake treatment.

4. 88 Minutes - $US6.8 million
We're thrilled to report that Al Pacino's latest effort has inched ahead in the Metacritic tracking from its original score of 2 to a much more respectable 17, though, not surprisingly, it has been stripped of its bronze medal in the Shitty Film-A-Lympics.

5. Nim's Island - $US5.65 million
Not even a second-billed Jodie Foster could get parents interested in the goings-on on Nim's Island, where mad scientist Dr. Nim, played by the lovable Abigail Breslin, successfully fused animal and human DNA in her misguided attempts to play God.

• WEEKEND BOX OFFICE April 18-20, 2008 [Box Office Mojo]

Tags: box office | forgetting sarah marshall | the forbidden kingdom