Obsessed Tops Box Office

Obsessed clawed its way to the top of the weekend box office with a fierce $28.6 million, or nearly as much as the debuts of Fighting, The Soloist and Earth combined. Overall, the weekend was among the most attended ever for the end of April, and business surged 25 percent over the same timeframe last year.
Unleashed on approximately 3,000 screens at 2,514 sites, Obsessed boasted the highest-grossing opening on record for a psycho stalker, erotic or "blank from hell" thriller. That's because the sub-genres' heyday of the late '80s/early '90s, which included Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, was a period when movies played at fewer theaters and had less opening weekend emphasis than they do today. Obsessed, though, outdrew any recent comparable title by a vast margin, such as Lakeview Terrace, Perfect Stranger, SwimFan and Enough.

Brandishing the tagline "All is fair when love is war," Obsessed was marketed as an over-the-top Fatal Attracton redux, inviting audiences to proclaim "Oh, no, she didn't!" and root for Beyonce to take out the psycho (Ali Larter) who's after her man. As rote as the picture may be, this type of storyline is enduring and relatable, and the trailer clearly spelled out the entire movie. Distributor Sony Pictures' exit polling suggested that 58 percent of the audience was female and 51 percent was over 25 years old.

The other nationwide debuts weren't nearly as impressive as Obsessed, but they rated at least passable by the standards of their sub-genres