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There's nothing like an enraged diva — Beyoncé Knowles giving a head butt to the psychopathic blonde who's trying to kill her and steal her husband — to bring out the crowds on a spring weekend. Enough customers were transfixed by the fatal-distraction drama Obsessed to place it at the top of the weekend's box-office chart with a surprisingly robust $28.5 million, according to early studio estimates. The PG-13 thriller more than doubled the take of its nearest competitor, 17 Again, and earned nearly as much over the weekend as the total of the three other movies that opened in wide release. It is the all-time highest grosser (surpassing the 2004 Lindsay Lohan–Tina Fey comedy Mean Girls) for the last weekend in April, when traditionally hardly anyone goes to the movies.

For the film industry, April is the cruelest month, a late Lent before the big "summer" film feast begins in early May. (This year's Maytime blockbuster hopefuls: Wolverine, Star Trek, Angels & Demons, Terminator Salvation and Night at the Museum; and those are just the major sequels, prequels and remakes.) The last weekend in April is a kind of movie doggie day care, where Hollywood stashes its unwanted mutts until they can be unleashed on DVD. Given the low-rent release date of Obsessed, and Sony Screen Gems' refusal to screen it for critics, industry analysts predicted an opening weekend of $15-17 million. Yet the movie, which pairs Knowles with The Wire's Idris Elba as her victimized husband, transcended the reliable African-American constituency and lured a broad base of teens and young couples. It is, after all, the perfect creep-out date movie.

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That left the guys who couldn't get dates no option but to see Fighting, which is essentially Fight Club without Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, David Fincher or any pretense of artistry or ambiguity. Fighting is to Fight Club what its star Channing Tatum's one previous hit, the 2006 Step Up, was to every poor-boy-with-a-dream dance movie before it, from Saturday Night Fever to Save the Last Dance — which is to say, a worn retread, but with more bare-knuckle brawls. No matter: young guys' collective movie memory can be counted in the months; or maybe, like most everyone, they just like to see the same stories with different faces. Exceeding most analysts' expectations, Fighting pulled in $11.4 million.

In the March of the Penguins category of adorable documentary, Disney offered Earth, a cut-down and cuted-up version of the 2006 BBC series Planet Earth. Mixing and milking the week's two do-gooder events — Earth Day and Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day — Disney fashioned its own Take Your Kid to a Movie Called Earth Day and harvested a very green $4 million on its Wednesday opening. That 24-hr. gesture must have exhausted American moviegoers' impulse to save the planet, for in the next four days, including the weekend, Earth didn't come near the daily $4 million mark. It will conclude the Friday-to-Sunday session with $8.6 million, not bad for documentary, but far less than Obsessed grossed on Friday alone.

Yet that was enough to keep Earth neck-and-neck with the weekend's prestige drama debut, the true-life male weepie The Soloist, which grossed $9.7 million. Retelling the story (already aired on 60 Minutes) of a homeless, schizophrenic cellist befriended by a Los Angeles Times columnist, it's the sort of serioso uplifter that usually gets released in December and garners major awards. Its stars have been in aisle seats on Oscar Night: Jamie Foxx as the musician, Robert Downey, Jr., as the newspaperman. But The Soloist was pulled from a late-year release, to be dumped in the no-man's-land of late April. And though the film nabbed respectful reviews, audiences were quick to realize it was neither Iron Man nor Ray. Directed by Joe Wright, who did the posh Brit drama Atonement, the new film looks unlikely to match Atonement's $51 million domestic take, let alone the $78 million it made abroad.

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According to Hollywood wisdom, films aimed at the young grab a huge share of their revenue in the first weekend, then fall off a cliff as the kids move on to the next week's must-see. Adult-oriented dramas are supposed to have staying power, because the over-30s don't feel compelled to rush out to movies the day they open; word-of-mouth will lead them there eventually. But State of Play, which stars Russell Crowe as another crusading newsman, and which finished second to 17 Again last weekend, fell to seventh place in its sophomore frame, with $6.9 million; it also lost more of its audience than the Zac Efron comedy did. Sometimes, if grownups don't come to a film on the first weekend, it may mean they're sitting this one out.

Fatal Disclosure
Besides, couples of any age found they could agreeably slum through the marital-arts shock therapy of Obsessed. Elba is an investment guru and Knowles his former secretary, now at home with their child. At first they have one of those healthy, symbiotic marriages that real life may sometimes provide (Barack and Michelle?) but that you never find in movie comedies, and that exist in drama only to be blown apart.

Enter Ali Larter — who a decade ago was the blond in the whipped-cream bikini in Varsity Blues and lately has played Jessica/Niki/Tracy on Heroes — as an office temp, or do we mean temptress? She has an instant itch for Elba and imagines he feels the same; to her, Asset Manager is just the formal designation for Ass Man. Soon she's groping him in a bathroom, stripping down to her Victoria's Secrets in his car, doping his drink at a business retreat so she can waylay him in his hotel room. When she takes some sleeping pills in his room, Knowles is finally brought into the triangle. And then Larter gets really mean.

The Elba character synthesizes two Michael Douglas roles in movies about white-collar husbands victimized by predatory females: Fatal Attraction and Disclosure. The only wrinkle is that the man is black, the crazy lady white. In a New York Times review of the film, Stephen Holden notes that Elba and Larter physically resemble O.J. Simpson and his late ex-wife Nicole, which, Holden argues, "lends Obsessed a distasteful taint of exploitation." But this isn't a rewriting of the O.J. murder farrago. It's closer to another case involving a high-profile athlete: the L.A. Lakers' Kobe Bryant, who beat a rape rap brought by a young white woman with whom he had sex in a Colorado motel room. In Obsessed, the woman is utterly ruthless, the man wholly blameless. Indeed, he's a passive character — a pliable politician who just wants to "keep looking forward" — compared with his suspicious wife and his nutsy stalker. Elba plays the victim here; Knowles will be the avenger.

Written by David Loughery (who did the thriller Lakeview Terrace) and directed by Steve Shill (a veteran of many TV series, including The Wire), Obsessed takes ages to get its scare machinery moving. All theater seats should be equipped with fast-forward buttons for the first hour, in which Knowles is seen for about five minutes. Larter carries that section, and she's intimidatingly efficient at her task, using her throaty, knowing voice to lend intimacy and innuendo to every sentence.

Credit her with the movie's two grisly frissons. Having conned her way into the Elba-Knowles home, she stands in their infant son's bedroom, holding the child before she absconds with him. Then she leaves him in the back seat of Elba's car, a lipstick imprint on the boy's forehead. Elba is required to disappear for the climactic cat fight — so, oddly, is the child — and the all-girl whacking, choking and head-butting commence. If this picture proves anything, it's that you don't need guys for a rousing bare-knuckle fight.

Obsessed also certifies the crossover appeal of appealing performers from other media. After Miley Cyrus's Hannah Montana: The Movie, and 17 Again with Zac Efron, the Beyoncé film is the third consecutive weekend winner to be headlined by a young star from the worlds of pop music and TV musicals. Apparently, if you can sing, you can make the multiplex cash registers ring.

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The official estimation of the top 10 finishers, as reported by Box Office Mojo:

1. Obsessed, $28.5 million, first weekend
2. 17 Again, $11.7 million; $40 million in 10 days
3. Fighting, $11.4 million, first weekend
4. The Soloist, $9.7 million, first weekend
5. Earth, $8.6 million; $14.2 million in five days
6. Monsters vs Aliens, $8.5 million; $174.8 million in 31 days
7. State of Play, $6.9 million; $25.1 million in 10 days
8. Hannah Montana: The Movie, $6.4 million; $65.6 million in 17 days
9. Fast & Furious, $6.1 million; $145.2 million in 24 days
10. Crank: High Voltage, $2.4 million; $11.5 million in 10 days

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• Richard Corliss