Jessica Chastain Just Opened a Movie at No. 1 That Audiences Gave the Worst Grade in Two Years, and She Is Still Winning
Jessica Chastain Just Opened a Movie at No. 1 That Audiences Gave the Worst Grade in Two Years, and She Is Still Winning
Jessica Chastain has pulled off the strangest victory of the 2026 box office season. Her new horror film Other Mommy opened at No. 1 this weekend with roughly $28 million in domestic ticket sales. And the people who actually sat through it gave it the worst audience grade any wide release has received in two years.
That is the headline. The film made a fortune and moviegoers loathed it, and both things are true at once.
The box office numbers, explained
Other Mommy arrived in theaters on Friday, October 9, from Universal Pictures, with Blumhouse and James Wan’s Atomic Monster producing and Rob Savage directing. Chastain plays two roles: Ursula, the mother of an eight-year-old girl named Bela, and the Other Mommy herself, a sinister entity that comes out of the child’s closet looking and sounding exactly like her mother.
The commercial story started strong before opening day. Thursday night previews pulled in $3.6 million from 2,850 screens, beating expectations. Friday added up to $12.6 million including those previews, and the weekend landed at an estimated $27.5 to $28 million, easily the top spot at the domestic box office.
That number crushed Universal’s own projection of $20 million. Pre-release tracking had swung wildly, from $17 million on the low end to as high as $35 million.
For context, Chastain’s earlier horror openings tell an interesting story. Mama, her 2013 breakthrough in the genre, opened at $28.4 million. IT Chapter Two, in which she played the adult Beverly Marsh, opened at a massive $91 million.
The film also kept pace with Universal’s recent horror launches. The Black Phone opened at $23.6 million, The Black Phone 2 at $27.3 million, and The Exorcist: Believer at $26.5 million.
Meanwhile, the weekend’s other major new release, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, opened to about $6 million. In a battle between a wide topical drama and a star-driven horror film, the genre movie won in a rout.
A D+ is rarer than you think
CinemaScore, which polls opening-night audiences, handed Other Mommy a D+. That is the worst audience grade for any movie since the flop Megalopolis back in 2024.
The reviews were just as rough. The film sits at about 18 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with audiences giving it roughly 46 percent. The comparison making the rounds is a painful one: Other Mommy has now been graded more harshly than Madame Web, which won Worst Picture at the Razzies and still managed a C+ CinemaScore with a 53 percent audience score.
Universal never screened the film for the US press before release, which in hindsight looks like the studio knew exactly what it had. The reviews that landed were brutal. Variety’s critic called it one of the limpest and most ineffectual films of the year.
What critics did praise, almost across the board, was Chastain herself and her young co-star Arabella Olivia Clark, who plays Bela. The complaints were about the machinery around them: too much CGI spectacle, too many jump scares, and a mythology that many reviewers called muddled.
The film is based on Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, with a screenplay by Nathan Elston. Malerman is the author behind Bird Box, and the story grew out of a real incident in his brother’s family.
Why people showed up anyway
So why did a movie with a D+ CinemaScore win the weekend? The answer is marketing, timing, and one movie star.
The trailer played in front of The Odyssey back in July, putting the film’s eerie dual-Chastain concept in front of a huge audience months before release. 2026 has also been a banner year for horror, and audiences were primed for a big October scare. Other Mommy was the only major horror option in theaters.
Then there is Chastain herself. The Oscar winner has genuine credibility with horror fans after Mama and IT Chapter Two, and the sight of her playing both a mother and the creature imitating her was a trailer-friendly hook. When the reviews arrived late and ugly, the curious had already bought their tickets.
The budget is the real headline
Here is the detail that changes everything about this story. Other Mommy reportedly cost only $18 to $19 million to make. That means it nearly covered its entire production budget in a single weekend, so the film will very likely be profitable for the studio.
That is a very different outcome from the one Tom Cruise is facing after Digger’s $8 million opening on a budget reported at $125 million or more. Chastain’s film cost roughly one-seventh of Cruise’s and opened more than three times bigger. In the cold math of Hollywood, Other Mommy is a hit and Digger is a disaster, even though only one of those films got a D+ from its audience.
The poor audience reaction does suggest a steep second weekend drop. But the film is already close to break-even before streaming, home video, and international markets enter the picture.
Chastain’s horror track record says this is not a fluke
There is a pattern here worth noticing. Chastain opened Mama at $28.4 million in 2013, then joined the IT Chapter Two ensemble for a $91 million opening in 2019. Whatever the quality of the individual films, she remains one of the few dramatic actresses who can reliably open a horror movie.
The dual role in Other Mommy, playing both the terrified mother and the thing in the closet, is exactly the kind of swing she takes seriously. Critics who hated the movie still singled her out, and that matters for whatever she does next in the space.
And the competition is only getting fiercer. Scarlett Johansson is about to test her own horror luck when The Exorcist: Martyrs lands in March 2027. Chastain just showed Johansson what the ceiling looks like, and what the floor does not matter.
The bottom line
It opened at No. 1, beat its studio’s projection by $8 million, and will almost certainly make money. It also earned the worst audience grade in two years, worse than a Razzie-winning superhero flop. It was a very different box office weekend from the one when Verity beat Digger, but the star-power lesson is the same.
Hollywood does not care much about the difference. A $28 million opening on a $19 million budget is a success story, full stop. Chastain delivered the opening, the studio covered its costs in three days, and the D+ will be a footnote in the financial report.
The lesson for everyone watching the 2026 box office: the audience grade measures satisfaction, not spending. And in October, with Halloween around the corner, spending is all that counts.
Further reading
Jessica Chastain’s team has not commented publicly on the CinemaScore grade. For the original audience-grade reporting, see JustJared and the full opening-weekend breakdown at ComicBasics.
