‘Other Mommy’ Is Eating ‘The Social Reckoning’ Alive at the Box Office

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026 — The critics hated it. The trailer scared half the internet. And on Thursday night, America showed up anyway. Other Mommy — the Jessica Chastain supernatural horror film that opened Friday — pulled $3.6 million in Thursday previews, nearly six times the $650,000 posted by its fellow opener The Social Reckoning, according to box office figures reported by ComingSoon.net and AsiaOne, citing data from The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. The film is now tracking a $20 million opening weekend on a $19 million production budget. Do that math: it could nearly earn back its entire budget before Sunday night.

That is not a typo, and it is not close. The Social Reckoning — the buzzy, prestige-adjacent drama — is tracking $7 to $8 million for the weekend. Other Mommy is on pace to nearly triple it. In the Halloween corridor, the movie about the thing in the closet is beating the movie about the thing in the news feed, and it isn’t particularly close.

Here’s what makes the numbers delicious: by every critical measure, this movie should be dead on arrival. Rotten Tomatoes: 19% from 52 critics, averaging 4.4 out of 10. Metacritic: 39 out of 100 — “generally unfavorable.” Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a D+. The New York Times called it, via its review roundup, a “sometimes-creepy, sometimes-hilarious schlockfest,” openly questioning what the Other Mommy is even supposed to be. And yet — $3.6 million on Thursday night. Horror doesn’t need critics. Horror needs a trailer that makes people jump and a release date two weeks before Halloween.

The filmWhat $3.6 million bought

For the uninitiated: Other Mommy is directed by Rob Savage — the British filmmaker behind the pandemic Zoom horror Host and The Boogeyman — from a script by Succession writer Nathan Elston. It’s adapted from Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel Incidents Around the House; Malerman is the Bird Box author, which tells you exactly what flavor of dread we’re dealing with. James Wan produced through his Blumhouse/Atomic Monster banner. Universal is distributing.

Jessica Chastain plays two roles: Ursula Martin, mother of eight-year-old Bela (newcomer Arabella Olivia Clark), and the supernatural entity that lives in Bela’s closet — a thing that looks and sounds exactly like her mother and keeps asking to enter the child’s heart. The supporting cast includes Jay Duplass as Bela’s father, plus Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed, and Karen Allen. It’s rated R, runs a lean 93 minutes, and cost $19 million — Blumhouse-economics horror, the kind where a $20 million opening isn’t just a win, it’s a victory lap.

The film was originally dated for May 8, 2026 before Universal wisely slid it into the Halloween run-up — a move that looks smarter with every preview dollar. Chastain has been doing the press rounds with genuine enthusiasm, telling fans on Instagram that the shoot was “a delight” behind the scenes but “a matter for your therapist” once the lights go down. She also gamely played a promotional “who is more mother?” game for Out Magazine, pitting horror’s great maternal figures against each other — and repeatedly picking Aliens’ Ellen Ripley over her own characters, joking “sorry, Jessica Chastain” to herself, as ComingSoon.net reported.

The splitWhy critics and crowds disagree — again

This is the oldest story in horror. Critics reward coherence, theme, craft; horror audiences reward the jolt. The RT consensus, as stated on Rotten Tomatoes, is blunt: “Despite a valiant turn from Jessica Chastain as the spectral embodiment of a smothering parent, Other Mommy proves too silly for its intermittently effective jump scares to add up to a spooky whole.” It reads like a review of a film the audience never intended to watch. The audience came for the jump scares. The jump scares, by the critics’ own admission, intermittently work. Transaction complete.

The D+ CinemaScore is the one number that should give Universal pause — it suggests the people who showed up Thursday didn’t love what they saw, which usually means a steep second-weekend drop. But here’s the thing about a $19 million budget and a $20 million opening: there is no second weekend that matters. The film will be profitable before most of its audience has even decided whether they liked it. That’s the Blumhouse model working exactly as designed — keep the budget low, nail the marketing, open in the right corridor, and let the math do the rest.

And the marketing was undeniable. The trailer went properly viral earlier this week — Chastain’s “scary face” moment was all over social feeds, as we covered Thursday — and ComingSoon.net reports the film even has a post-credits stinger, with the entity leaning into the camera to whisper “shhhhhhh.” A franchise tease on a $19 million movie that opens to $20 million. You do the math on what Universal greenlights next.

The takeHorror wins October again

Every October, the industry rediscovers the same lesson: horror is the most review-proof genre in the business. A $19 million movie with a viral trailer, a movie star doing double duty, and a Halloween-adjacent release date does not need 19% to become 90%. It needs teenagers with Friday-night plans and a dare. Other Mommy had all of that, and the $3.6 million Thursday is the receipt.

As for The Social Reckoning — $650,000 in previews and a $7–8 million tracking number is a rough start for a film that presumably wanted to be part of the cultural conversation this weekend. Instead, the conversation is about the mommy in the closet. There’s probably a metaphor in there about what America actually wants from its entertainment right now. But the box office doesn’t do metaphors. It does $3.6 million versus $650,000, and it does it in big block numbers.