CONFIRMED
Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, the Jessica Chastain horror film from Universal and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, is heading for a steep second-weekend fall. Deadline’s Saturday update projects a $7.85M three-day weekend, down 72% from its $27.5M opening, with a running domestic total of $44.3M and a third-place finish. Those are projections, not actuals, and the final numbers are due Sunday, October 18.
What we know
Deadline reported that Other Mommy won its opening weekend of October 9 to 11 with an estimated $27.5M from 3,365 screens, and described the result as a strong debut despite dismal reviews. Deadline’s chart broke the weekend down as $12.6M Friday, $8.95M Saturday and $5.95M Sunday, following $3.6M in Thursday previews from 2,850 theaters.
That landed inside the range Variety had projected, $22M to $28M, and well above the roughly $20M Deadline said Universal expected. Deadline put the production budget at about $19M before marketing and called the opening solid on that basis. Box Office Mojo lists the opening slightly higher at $27.8M, with $36.5M domestic and $54.4M worldwide at its latest update. The domestic figure matches Deadline’s week one total.
Then came weekend two. Deadline’s Saturday update has the film on 3,370 theaters with a second Friday of $2.56M, an 80% drop from opening Friday. From there Deadline projects a $7.85M weekend, a 72% fall, and third place behind newer competition that includes Street Fighter, You Can See Everything and Whalefall.
The reception has been rough. The Playlist noted an 18% Rotten Tomatoes score, and the CinemaScore was a D+. Universal did not screen the film for critics until the night before release, which tends to be a tell. On the other side of the ledger, Variety pointed to a viral trailer that ran in front of The Odyssey, which IndieWire also reported, and that marketing clearly got people in the door on opening night.
What is rumored
Comic Basics, an outlet we do not normally rely on, frames the second weekend as a collapse driven by poor word of mouth. The 80% Friday drop it cites is supported by Deadline. The comparison figures it uses against other horror films come from an unattributed social media post, and we could not verify them. The causal link to word of mouth is that outlet’s interpretation.
Ahead of the weekend, JoBlo’s Chris Bumbray predicted a drop of 70% or more and called the film front-loaded. A UK box office blog made a similar call on UK data. Both were analyst opinion rather than results, though Deadline’s projection is consistent with them.
Box Office Watch, an algorithmic forecasting site, projected a final domestic total of roughly $52.8M to $60.8M as of October 15, with a wider range of $43.2M to $70.5M. That model ran before weekend two and is not an official figure.
Koimoi, an Indian box office aggregator, claims the film was already profitable after five days. That rests on a simple budget-versus-gross comparison. Universal has not disclosed marketing spend or theater splits, so nobody outside the studio can say that with confidence.
What we don’t know yet
The final second-weekend actuals. Deadline’s Saturday figures are projections, and Sunday numbers can shift the percentage a point or two either way.
Whether the overall take qualifies as a disappointment. Deadline’s reporting on the opening rules out the idea that the film flopped on release, and a Scot Scoop News headline claiming it fell short of Halloween horror expectations does not square with the opening beating Universal’s own target. We could not retrieve that article, so this rests on the Deadline and Variety figures rather than its text.
What happens in the two weekends before Halloween. Horror can hold in late October, but a D+ CinemaScore is a heavy anchor.
What it means
Both things are true at once. Other Mommy opened well, roughly $7.5M above expectations and above its budget, and it is now shedding audience fast. The viral trailer sold a premise, the film did not sell itself, and the drop reflects that.
For Blumhouse and Universal, a $19M picture that passes $44M domestic in ten days is not a disaster, whatever the final verdict on profit. For the rest of us, it is a reminder that a trailer going viral and a movie working are different things. We will update once Deadline and Variety post the Sunday actuals.