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What if they had a weekend and no movies showed up? This is a question we sometimes deal with at the end of the year and maybe Labor Day weekend, but for the first weekend of April? That's kind of a new one.

OK, technically it's not *no* new films, but we're talking about two very niche films that don't have a lot of marketing and aren't even really trying to compete in the mainstream marketplace. You often see films ducking the opening weekend of a blockbuster, but completely avoiding the *second* weekend of a rapidly crashing dirigible?

Anyway, we have God's Not Dead 2 leading the way, the latest in a series of exceedingly smug and paranoid religiously-based films that aren't even attempting at cross-demographic appeal (no, you did not see what I did there). After making about $60 million on a budget of basically nothing by feeding evangelicals their own fever dreams back to them, they're back for another round of “nope, didn't happen” urban legends about how Christianity is being erased from America. I'm betting Kevin Sorbo is really regretting agreeing to having his character killed off in the first film, but maybe he can appear in a blue outline like Anakin Skywalker at the end of this one.

The sequel moves from the university campus to the realm of public schools, with a story of how people go insane and berzerker at any mention of Jesus, as we do, and includes a C-team of notable conservative and/or religious actors, including Melissa Joan Hart, Ray Wise, Robin Givens, Ernie Hudson, Pat Boone (!) and Fred Thompson, but it's not as if the first film was packed with stars either. Anyway, this is essentially a legal-procedural packed with paranoid wish-fulfillment that is literally preaching to the choir. The first film opened to about $9 million and found some legs – it's lost a bit of the surprise effect and may open slightly higher, but I don't expect legs as strong. That's also to mention that the religious film market has become a bit more saturated in the past few years and has also seen a couple of flops, showing that this market is becoming a bit more picky as its audience is given options. I'd expect an opening weekend of about $11 million.

Our other new film this weekend, opening in a selected release, is of the “...the hell?” variety. Entitled Meet the Blacks, the movie is half class and race comedy, the other half ham-fisted parody of The Purge movies. Comedian Mike Epps stars as the patriarch of the Black family (subtle as a ballpeen hammer to the temple, that one). They move to Beverly Hills right at the start of The Purge, a 12-hour period where all crime is legal (and they didn't hear about this widely known event because...?). As the only black family in Beverly Hills (fact!) they are obvious targets, except it appears to be at the hands of other black people because this film isn't interested in coherency, and also because it means they can stunt cast Mike Tyson, making this a unique weekend with both he and Givens having roles in premiering films.

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