General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Jumping the Broom

Jumping the Broom is a 2011 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Salim Akil, in his feature directorial debut, about two African-American families from divergent socioeconomic backgrounds who gather for a wedding weekend at a Martha's Vineyard estate.¹^•² It stars Paula Patton as corporate lawyer Sabrina Watson and Laz Alonso as Wall Street worker Jason Taylor, whose whirlwind engagement brings her old-money parents, played by Angela Bassett and Brian Stokes Mitchell, face to face with Jason's postal-worker mother, played by Loretta Devine.³ The film takes its title from the broomstick wedding custom, in which enslaved couples jumped over a broom to signify their marriage at a time when legal marriage was forbidden to them.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Release	May 6, 2011 (wide, United States), distributed by Sony Pictures; video release August 9, 2011²
Director and writers	Salim Akil; screenplay by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs⁵
Producers	T. D. Jakes, Curtis Wallace, Tracey E. Edmonds, Elizabeth Hunter, Glendon Palmer, and Michael Mahoney⁵
Principal cast	Paula Patton, Laz Alonso, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, Meagan Good, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Mike Epps⁵^•⁶
Box office	$37,295,394 domestic; $863,207 international; $38,158,601 worldwide²
Budget	$7,000,000 per The Numbers; $6,600,000 per Box Office Mojo²^•⁷
Rating and genre	PG-13 (some sexual content); romantic comedy²

Spoilers

Plot and premise

Sabrina Watson, a successful corporate lawyer from an old-money family, accepts the marriage proposal of Jason Taylor after a whirlwind courtship.³ The two families convene for the wedding at the Watson family's Martha's Vineyard estate, where Sabrina's upper-crust mother (Angela Bassett) hosts Jason's mother Pam (Loretta Devine), who arrives from Brooklyn and seems out of place.⁸ As the clans clash over food, clothes, and wedding traditions, including Pam's wish that the couple jump the broom, family secrets on both sides come to light and threaten the nuptials.⁴^•⁹

The broom ritual itself carries the film's central tension. The Watson women are dismissive of Pam's wish that Sabrina and Jason jump over a broom, the practice by which enslaved people signified marriage when legal marriage was forbidden to them; when Mrs. Watson hears the custom has passed down in the Taylor family, she declares, "Our family weren't slaves. We owned slaves."⁴^•⁶ A scholarly account of the film describes its plot as premised on the clash of two socially distinct Black families who disagree on the use of symbols commemorating slave heritage in modern African America.¹⁰

Production

Key people. Salim Akil, then primarily a television director, made his theatrical feature debut with the film.⁹ The screenplay was written by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, who also served among the producers alongside T. D. Jakes, Curtis Wallace, Tracey E. Edmonds, Glendon Palmer, and Michael Mahoney.⁵ Production companies were Our Stories Films, Stage 6 Films, and TDJ Enterprises, with Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group handling distribution.⁵

Financing and faith. Jakes, founder and senior pastor of the Potter's House, a 30,000-member church in Dallas, partially financed the roughly $7-million film, and religion plays a significant role in the story, including unexpected dramatic plot twists.¹¹ Jakes makes a cameo as Sabrina's family minister.⁹ Reviewers noted that despite his involvement the film is not straightforwardly a Christian film in the way of explicitly faith-based productions.¹² Jumping the Broom was only the second release of Our Stories Films, a company that had been largely shut down for years after backlash to its first film and a weak economy.¹¹

Filming. The film was shot in Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia, standing in for Martha's Vineyard, the setting of the story.¹

Box office

The film opened wide on May 6, 2011 in 2,035 theaters and earned $15,215,487 on opening weekend, 40.8 percent of its eventual domestic total, finishing third for the weekend.² It ran eight weeks in release, with weekly drops of roughly 46 to 54 percent, and closed with $37,295,394 domestically and $863,207 internationally, a worldwide total of $38,158,601, about 5.5 times its production budget.² Domestic business accounted for 97.7 percent of the worldwide gross.⁷ Estimated home video sales added $7,864,132 from DVD and $1,594,971 from Blu-ray.²

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 56 percent Tomatometer from 82 reviews and a 58 percent audience score, with the critics consensus finding its heart and cast appealing but the film too cliched and thinly written to recommend.³ Reviews were divided. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times praised Akil's confident debut and the ensemble's handling of class clashes within the African American community, calling the film proof that a major studio release can still be fun, smart, and heart-tugging.⁴ Roger Ebert, longtime film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times and winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, called it a good time at the movies with a large, well-chosen cast, while questioning whether the film's class-conflict dialogue rang true.⁶ The Village Voice-published Variety review found the film avoided many predictable genre clichés but lacked warmth and laughs, and Time Out judged that while the film showcases rarely depicted class issues within the Black community, it relies on stereotypes to delineate them.¹³^•¹⁴ Common Sense Media highlighted the performances of Bassett and Devine as the two mothers and called it a romantic comedy actually worth seeing.⁹ The film received an NAACP Image Award nomination.⁹

The custom behind the title

Jumping the broom as a wedding ritual has a history that extends beyond the film. A Cambridge University Press chapter on the custom traces its depiction in European visual satire to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with satirical prints flourishing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the practice was exploited for disturbing purposes against enslaved men and women in the United States.¹⁵ Scholarship on African-American weddings notes that the ritual's twentieth-century revival owed much to the 1970s television miniseries Roots, and that the 2011 film is arguably the most potent revelation that the ritual maintains a position in the cultural identity of Black America.¹⁰ The film itself uses the broomstick wedding to explore intersections of class, race, and culture in the United States, alongside differing views among African Americans on the custom's relevance to Black matrimony in the twenty-first century.¹

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026