Other Mommy's Staring Down a $20M Weekend — and The Social Reckoning Might Not Crack $8M

LOS ANGELES — Here's the state of the box office heading into the weekend: a Blumhouse horror movie starring Jessica Chastain is about to eat everybody's lunch, and the sequel to one of the most acclaimed films of the century might not crack eight million dollars. October is supposed to be spooky season, and it turns out that's the only season audiences are actually showing up for.

Other Mommy, the original supernatural horror film from Universal and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, opens Friday in roughly 3,200 theaters, and the tracking is genuinely strong. Industry projections have it around $20 million for the three-day, with Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast landing in a $15M–$25M window. The Wrap reports current projections around $24 million domestically, and some theatrical sources think it could push toward $30 million if the early audience reception is strong. For an original horror film with a reported budget in the $18–19 million range, anything in that window is a very comfortable opening.

The film comes from director Rob Savage and adapts Josh Malerman's novel about an eight-year-old girl contending with a sinister figure she calls her "Other Mommy." Chastain plays both the mother and the doppelganger, and the trailers — which have been running in front of Resident Evil and The Odyssey — reportedly clicked with horror fans the way Ethan Hawke's Grabber turn did for The Black Phone back in 2022. That's the comp that matters: The Black Phone opened to $23.6 million and legged out to $90 million domestic and $161 million worldwide. Other Mommy is tracking almost exactly on that line.

Then there's the other new release, and it's a very different conversation. The Social Reckoning — Aaron Sorkin's write-and-direct companion piece to The Social Network — opens in about 2,500 theaters this Friday, and every tracker has it in the same gloomy place. Boxoffice Pro says $6M–$10M. Box Office Theory says $8M–$13M. World of Reel is down at $4M–$6M. Startefacts, crunching all of them, lands on $7 million.

Sixteen years ago, The Social Network opened to $22.4 million from 2,776 locations and went on to make $225 million worldwide. Even the most optimistic projection for The Social Reckoning doesn't reach half of that opening. The film stars Jeremy Strong and Mikey Madison (with Jeremy Allen White in the ensemble, per Boxoffice Pro's casting notes) and digs into the Wall Street Journal's 2021 "Facebook Files" investigation — the leaked internal documents showing Meta knew about the harmful effects of its platforms and looked the other way. It's exactly the kind of caustic, issue-driven adult drama that has been struggling to draw post-COVID audiences. The Wrap notes it plainly: the vast majority of films explicitly tackling politics and current events have flopped since the pandemic. The review embargo held until October 7, two days before opening — never a studio's move of confidence — and the early response has been warm rather than rapturous, with Rotten Tomatoes sitting around the mid-60s.

For Blumhouse, this weekend is the latest chapter in one of the great studio rebound stories of the decade. Last year was rough: original titles like Wolf Man, Drop and The Woman in the Yard weren't disasters on their low budgets, but they failed to start any new franchises the way The Black Phone did in 2022. This year is a different universe. Curry Barker's Obsession, made for roughly $750,000, has scared up more than $501 million worldwide — Deadline notes it's the first original movie of the 2020s to pass $500 million globally. Kane Parsons' Backrooms, adapted from his own YouTube creepypasta series, opened to $81 million in May and has climbed past $396 million worldwide, becoming A24's highest-grossing release ever. Add in Lee Cronin's The Mummy ($90.5M) and the new Insidious: Out of the Further (a $60 million global opening), and Blumhouse Atomic Monster's four major 2026 releases have collectively crossed $1 billion at the worldwide box office — the second time since Jason Blum and James Wan formally merged the labels in 2024. All four films were made for a combined production budget of about $50.75 million.

The timing helps, too. It's a quieter autumn stretch — last weekend Verity won the frame while Digger cratered at roughly $8 million — and Sony's own Resident Evil is still holding well enough to be the horror competition through Halloween, with DC's Clayface arriving later in the month. Other Mommy gets two weeks of relatively clear runway before Street Fighter and Whalefall show up on October 16. If the Chastain film opens where the high end of tracking says it can, the legs could take it well past $100 million domestic. If The Social Reckoning opens where every tracker says it will, it becomes this year's latest exhibit in the argument that grown-up dramas need streaming, not theaters.

One more wrinkle worth watching: Chastain's film got the premium large-format bookings and an aggressive marketing push that skews toward younger female and older male demos — exactly the demo split that's been powering horror all year. Backrooms did 90% of its business with viewers under 35, and Obsession skewed heavily 17-to-34. Horror is the only genre right now where the theatrical audience reliably looks like the future. Everything else is renting an aging crowd.