Jessica Chastain's R-rated chiller is about to overtake Crimson Peak and The Debt to crack her career top ten in the US, even as word of mouth stays ugly.
Four days in, and Other Mommy still won't let go of the No. 1 spot at the North American box office. Jessica Chastain's horror film pulled in $2.9 million on Monday, a 54% fall from Sunday, and that's with a US public holiday working against the trend. Columbus Day usually gives a film a bump. This one barely felt it.
The cumulative domestic total now sits at $30.7 million since the October 9 release, according to Koimoi. That's a number worth sitting with, because the reviews have not been kind. Word of mouth on this one is genuinely poor, and yet audiences keep showing up anyway, at least for now.
Here's the thing that makes this run notable beyond the weekly chart. Other Mommy is sitting at 12th on Chastain's all-time US box office list and needs less than $1 million more to slide past both Crimson Peak and The Debt. On current trajectory, that milestone likely lands with Tuesday's numbers. For an actor with credits stretching back to Zero Dark Thirty and Interstellar, cracking the top 10 off a horror movie that critics have largely shrugged at is its own kind of statement about what gets people into theatres in 2026.
The film is adapted from Josh Malerman's novel and leans entirely on a seven-year-old. Bela, played by a child actor carrying nearly every scene, befriends an entity in her house that wears her mother's face. The entity turns on her. It's the kind of premise that lives or dies on the central performance, since a horror film built around a child protagonist is rare to begin with, and one told almost entirely from that child's point of view is rarer still.
What's keeping Other Mommy afloat commercially despite the critical drubbing is simple economics. Production costs were low, so the studio doesn't need blockbuster numbers to call this a win. A $30 million-plus domestic haul inside four days, against a modest budget, already puts the film comfortably in profit territory, poor reviews or not.
That's the split that defines this release. Critics and a chunk of the audience clearly aren't buying what Other Mommy is selling. But curiosity, the Chastain name, and a marketing push around the mother-who-isn't-your-mother hook have been enough to keep ticket sales ticking over daily, even through a steep post-opening-weekend drop.
The real test comes this week. If Tuesday's numbers confirm the top-10 jump as expected, the conversation shifts from whether the film can hold the top spot to how far it can stretch before a second weekend reveals whether this was front-loaded curiosity or something with actual legs.
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