Believe it or not, Soul Surfer opened to decent numbers over the weekend, finishing fourth at the box office and making up most of its 15 million budget.

According to Huffington Post movie reviewer Scott Mendelson, that means Bethany Hamilton’s comeback story is well on it’s way to a nice little profit.

The next big opener was the somewhat surprising success of Soul Surfer, a low-on-the-radar ‘inspiration true story’ that Sony sold hard to Christian audiences (which makes sense, since the lead character’s faith is a major component of the story). The ‘young female surfer gets her arm bitten off by a shark but becomes a champion anyway’ tale grossed $11.1 million and received an ‘A+’ from Cinemascore, suggesting that this $15 million production is going to be a very leggy and very profitable little picture.

So let’s see if we can find a trend here: Gidget, Blue Crush and Soul Surfer have performed, while Big Wednesday, North Shore and Point Break are complete flops (and poor Big Wednesday was actually a good movie.)

I’m not sure what this means for pending flicks like the Jay Moriarty biopic, but I’m pretty sure the Lisa Andersen script is being dusted off about now up there in Tinseltown.