Jessica Chastain's 'Other Mommy' Earns $50M Despite Poor Reviews

Horror has long demonstrated a peculiar resilience to critical consensus, and the 2026 spooky season is delivering another compelling case study. Rob Savage's Other Mommy, starring [Jessica Chastain](/ article/jessica-chastain-to-lead-netflix-s-powerful-new-drama-the-retrievals), has crossed $50 million in global box office revenue within its first week of release — a remarkable figure that underscores both the genre's commercial momentum and Chastain's enduring power as a theatrical draw.

A Strong Financial Return Against a Modest Budget

According to Collider, Other Mommy has accumulated $30 million domestically and an additional $20 million from international markets, all against a reported production budget of just $19 million. That kind of return-on-investment ratio is precisely what studios look for when greenlighting lower-budget genre fare, and Savage's film has delivered it convincingly. The numbers situate it firmly alongside a wave of horror films that have outperformed expectations in theaters this year — a wave that has included other A24 originals and franchise entries alike, all benefiting from an audience that has increasingly made horror its theatrical genre of choice regardless of season.

What makes Other Mommy's performance particularly notable is the context surrounding it. The film arrived during peak spooky season, when horror inherently enjoys a marketing tailwind, but even accounting for that advantage, $50 million in under a week for an original, non-franchise property is a meaningful result.

The Source Material and the Story

The film is an adaptation of Josh Malerman's 2024 novel Incidents Around the House. Malerman, best known for Bird Box, has carved out a niche in high-concept domestic horror, and Other Mommy follows a similar emotional architecture. The story centers on Bela, an eight-year-old girl caught between her parents' marital strife and a sinister, shape-shifting presence she names "Other Mommy" — an entity that emerges from her closet and grows progressively more threatening to the entire household. The premise taps into a durable fear: the corruption of the maternal figure, the safe made suddenly dangerous. It is the kind of logline that, in skilled hands, carries genuine psychological weight.

Director Rob Savage, who built his reputation with the ingeniously constructed Host, brings a craftsman's economy to the material. Whether that economy translates to genuine dread on screen has proven deeply divisive.

Critical Reception and the Audience Disconnect

With a 17% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, Other Mommy joins a long and storied tradition of commercially successful horror films that critics found wanting. One review from ScreenRant awarded the film just 4 out of 10, noting that "nothing is scary about Other Mommy" and singling out only the film's opening sequence as possessing any real atmosphere. The gap between that assessment and the film's box office reality is wide enough to raise interesting questions about what general audiences are actually seeking from horror right now — spectacle, communal experience, or simply the comfort of a familiar dread.

Chastain herself is no stranger to navigating critical complexity. An Academy Award winner whose [commitment to challenging material](/ article/why-jessica-chastain-calls-the-bench-scene-in-molly-s-game-her-best-ever) has defined much of her career, she remains a figure capable of drawing audiences regardless of a project's Tomatometer score. Her presence here clearly functions as a significant piece of the marketing equation.

Looking Ahead for the Season

The horror landscape this weekend grows more competitive, with Angel Gómez Hernández's Crawlers entering wide release and angling for its own slice of the season's box office pie. Whether it can dent Other Mommy's momentum remains to be seen. What is already clear is that horror's dominance of the theatrical calendar — a trend that has seen genre films outperform even major franchise tentpoles in recent months — shows no signs of abating. For Chastain, Other Mommy represents a different kind of career chapter than, say, her upcoming work on Netflix's prestige drama The Retrievals, but commercially, it is an unambiguous win.

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