Other Mommy Got a D+ CinemaScore and an 18% From Critics. It's Still Leading the Box Office.

Other Mommy opened with $12.6 million at the domestic box office on October 9, enough to put it on course to lead the weekend. Its opening-night CinemaScore was a D+, the same grade Megalopolis received in September 2024 before that film's run collapsed, and its Rotten Tomatoes critics' score stood at 18% at the time of writing. That's an unusual combination: a substantial opening audience paired with an early reception that offers little encouragement for the weeks ahead.

A Box Office Winner With an Audience Problem

CinemaScore polls opening-night moviegoers as they leave the theater, before reviews or word of mouth have time to shape expectations. Other Mommy's D+ sits near the bottom of that scale. The film opened in 3,365 theaters after collecting $3.6 million in Thursday previews, and Universal is projecting a weekend total in the $28 million range, an estimate rather than a confirmed result. The Social Reckoning, the only other major wide release this weekend, was tracking considerably lower.

What Critics Said

Reviewers were even less forgiving than the opening-night crowd. Other Mommy holds an 18% Tomatometer score from 55 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, with the site's critics consensus calling it a film that "proves too silly for its intermittently effective jump scares to add up to a spooky whole." Deadline and Variety were similarly unimpressed, and The Hollywood Reporter's Richard Lawson wrote that the film was "missing a sense of dreadful build-up." Rotten Tomatoes' audience score stood at 46% over the same period, higher than the critics' rating but still below a positive consensus.

The Chastain Factor

Jessica Chastain has largely avoided this kind of reception in the genre before. Her three prior horror credits on Rotten Tomatoes, Mama in 2013, IT Chapter Two in 2019, and Crimson Peak in 2015, all landed in "fresh" territory, with Crimson Peak the best-reviewed of the three at 72%. Other Mommy breaks that streak. Chastain plays both roles at the center of the story: Ursula, a mother trying to protect her daughter Bela, and the "Other Mommy" entity that mimics her to get close to the girl. Director Rob Savage, working from Nathan Elston's screenplay adaptation of Josh Malerman's 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, built the marketing campaign around that doppelganger premise.

How It Stacks Up at the Box Office

A weekend in the high $20 millions would put Other Mommy ahead of Obsession's $17.1 million opening earlier this year, while remaining far below Backrooms' $81.4 million debut for A24. Those comparisons establish the scale of the opening. The more revealing number is what happens next weekend, when the film either builds on that start or falls back toward its roughly $19 million budget. The same weekend's other major release, Sony's The Social Reckoning, opened far softer, with $2.1 million on its first Friday across 2,606 locations and a weekend projection near $6 million against a $30 million production spend.

The Pulse24 Take

A D+ CinemaScore and an 18% critics' score are warning signs, but they don't determine a film's entire theatrical run on their own. Megalopolis is the cautionary comparison: it opened to about $4 million, then fell 73% in its second weekend on its way to a $7.6 million domestic total. Other Mommy is starting from a far stronger position: its opening day alone outgrossed Megalopolis's entire domestic run by a wide margin. That contrast suggests the film attracted an audience despite the negative reception. What remains unclear is whether that audience will recommend it to others, or whether curiosity about the premise and a quiet release calendar pulled forward demand that won't last into a second weekend. The Friday-to-Friday drop next week will be the more revealing number than this weekend's total. A sharp decline next weekend would suggest the opening didn't translate into word of mouth. A smaller-than-expected fall would complicate the assumption that poor early reception always means a short run.