Jessica Chastain’s Other Mommy Tops the Box Office With a D+ CinemaScore, While Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning Bombs
Horror won the weekend again. Universal and Blumhouse’s Other Mommy, starring Jessica Chastain, opened at number one with roughly $27.5 million domestically despite a brutal critical reception, while Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, Sony Pictures’ spiritual follow-up to The Social Network, stumbled badly in its own debut.
A Critic-Proof Opening for Other Mommy
Other Mommy casts Chastain in a dual role, playing both Ursula, a mother trying to protect her daughter Bela, and the sinister entity wearing her face. Jay Duplass plays Bela’s father Russ, Arabella Olivia Clark plays Bela, and the cast also includes Karen Allen, Dichen Lachman, and Arian Moayed. Rob Savage, the director behind Host and The Boogeyman, directed from a Nathan Elston screenplay based on Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, with James Wan producing through Blumhouse and Atomic Monster.
None of that stopped the reviews from being rough. Other Mommy landed a D+ CinemaScore from opening night audiences and a Rotten Tomatoes critics score stuck below 20 percent. Fangoria’s Todd Gilchrist summed up the general verdict, calling the film “a promising idea with wildly uneven execution.” None of it mattered much at the box office, where the film opened to roughly $27.5 million domestically and $17.6 million overseas, for a global start of about $45 million against a reported $19 million budget.
Other Mommy follows Bela as she bonds with a presence in her home that looks exactly like her own mother.
The Social Reckoning Can’t Find an Audience
Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed The Social Reckoning as a spiritual sequel to his 2010 film The Social Network, this time dramatizing the 2021 Facebook Files leak. Mikey Madison plays whistleblower Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White plays Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong returns to Sorkin’s world of tech moguls as Mark Zuckerberg, alongside Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, and Billy Magnussen. Sony Pictures released the film in the United States after a late September premiere in London.
Despite a notably stronger Rotten Tomatoes score than Other Mommy, The Social Reckoning opened to only around $5 million domestically, a steep shortfall against a reported production budget of $30 to $42 million. It’s a rough result for a film that was clearly positioned as an awards contender, and one that will need strong word of mouth or a long awards push to recover any ground.
Horror Keeps Winning
The weekend fits a pattern that’s defined much of 2026: original horror consistently outperforms expectations at the box office, reviews or not. Chastain isn’t stepping away from the genre either, with Apple TV+ still planning a 2027 release for her long-shelved thriller The Savant. For Sorkin, The Social Reckoning’s fate now likely rests on how far it can stretch into the awards conversation to offset a soft theatrical run.
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Picture Source: Universal Pictures, Universal Pictures (YouTube)
