Fox Searchlight Pictures' PG-rated urban appeal comedy drama "Kingdom Come" arrived in sixth place to an encouraging estimated $7.51 million at 1,111 theaters ($6,760 per theater). Its cume after five days is approximately $9.7 million and is slated to make a good profit. Importantly "Kingdom Come" had the highest per-theater average for any film playing in wide release last weekend.

Directed by Doug McHenry, "Kingdom Come" stars LL Cool J, Jada Pinkett Smith, Vivica A. Fox, Loretta Devine, Anthony Anderson, Toni Braxton, Cedric the Entertainer, Darius McCrary and Whoopi Goldberg. 

"We feel great about it," Fox Searchlight distribution president Stephen Gilula said Sunday morning. "It's a $7 million negative and we hit our target demographic really well. Even though we opened extremely well on Wednesday, as many African-American films do, we came back on Friday and went up on Saturday. So we feel very good about the reaction to the film and the word of mouth. It's playing quite well. So in a crowded marketplace I think we held our own really well." Will "Kingdom Come" go any wider? "Probably not," Gilula replied.

"We'll see how it does next weekend. I think that we opened a fair number of the smaller markets. We'll sort of respond and see how things go. We'll be able to play off the rest of the country with a lot of the prints we have. So I think we're at the right number. If you look back on films like 'The Original Kings of Comedy,' which only opened on 847 screens, they expanded, but they never got quite as wide as we are.

"The marginal numbers of screens really don't make much money. You look at the last 200 or 300 prints on those releases and they're generating a thousand dollars, at best. They're barely earning print costs, if that. We did a lot of studies. In fact, we really learned from our parent company, big Fox, which did (such African-American targeted films as) 'Waiting to Exhale,' 'Soul Food' and 'How Stella Got Her Groove Back.' We really took a lesson from them on what the right release pattern was."

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Pictures from the Kingdom Come premiere (i) LL and Vivica A. Fox (ii) Toni Braxton and  little sis (iii) Kirk Franklin and wife (iv) Jada, Will Smith and the family. 

More pictures from the Kingdom Come premiere (v) LL and his wife Simone (vi) Cedric the Entertainer (iii) Kirk Franklin and wife (iv) Jada, Will Smith and the family. For more visit our Photo Gallery