Jessica Chastain's twin-role horror film is tracking to beat Sony's Social Reckoning on their shared October 9 release date, trade projections suggest.
Jessica Chastain plays her own worst enemy twice over in Other Mommy, and going by early tracking, audiences are buying it. The Rob Savage-directed horror film opens October 9 across roughly 3,200 North American theatres, and according to projections cited by Koimoi, it's headed for an opening day north of $20 million.
That would put it ahead of the weekend's other big release, Sony's The Social Reckoning, which is tracking for a far more modest $7-8 million debut.
The Other Mommy trailer is what's done the heavy lifting here. It sells Chastain in a dual role, playing Ursula alongside a doppelganger version of herself that goes after Ursula's eight-year-old daughter, Bela, played by Arabella Olivia Clark. Jay Duplass, Karen Allen and Dichen Lachman round out the cast. The premise is simple and nasty in the way good horror trailers usually are, and on an $18 million budget, a $20 million-plus opening day would be a clean win before the weekend even totals up.
There's a side angle trade watchers have flagged too. If the projections hold, Other Mommy would land at the top of the US box office chart, right behind Anne Hathaway's Verity, meaning two female-led films occupy the top two slots. That's not nothing in an industry that still argues about whether women can open a movie.
The Social Reckoning, meanwhile, has a tougher assignment. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, it's pitched as a companion piece to 2010's The Social Network rather than a direct sequel, built around a Facebook engineer, played by Mikey Madison, who leaks internal documents to a Wall Street Journal reporter played by Jeremy Allen White. The story draws on the real 2021 Facebook disclosures from whistleblower Frances Haugen and journalist Jeff Horwitz. Jeremy Strong, Bill Burr, Betty Gilpin and Billy Magnussen fill out the ensemble.
What The Social Reckoning doesn't have is Fincher or Eisenberg. Both have stayed away from the follow-up, which is part of why Sony has been careful to call it a companion film instead of The Social Network 2. The original opened to $22 million in 2010 on its way to $224 million worldwide and four Oscars, including one for Sorkin's own screenplay. On a $30 million budget, this one needs real legs just to break even, and an opening in single digits makes that climb steeper.
None of this is locked in. Opening-day projections shift once Thursday previews and actual Friday numbers come through, and horror openings especially can swing on word of mouth that builds or dies within 24 hours. Other Mommy's test is whether that trailer buzz converts into Friday and Saturday holds. The Social Reckoning's test is whether Sorkin's name and the Facebook-scandal hook can pull in anyone who isn't already nostalgic for 2010.
Both numbers get confirmed Friday morning.
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