‘Other Mommy’ Earns a Brutal D+ Cinemascore, Landing Below ‘Madame Web’ With Audiences

Horror has had a banner year at the box office, and the weeks leading up to Halloween are traditionally when the genre shines brightest. Hits like ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ have kept audiences coming back for scares, so expectations were high for Universal and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster’s latest release, ‘Other Mommy’.

On paper, the Jessica Chastain horror movie had plenty going for it. Directed by Rob Savage, the filmmaker behind ‘Host’ and ‘The Boogeyman’, it adapts Josh Malerman’s novel ‘Incidents Around the House’ with a screenplay by ‘Succession’ writer Nathan Elston and James Wan on board as producer.

Now that the film has hit theaters, the verdict is in, and it’s rough. ‘Other Mommy’ is sitting at 19% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, alongside a 47% audience score and a D+ from CinemaScore, a combination that makes it the worst-received wide release of the year so far.

To put that in perspective, ‘Madame Web’, which won Worst Picture at the Razzies, earned a C+ CinemaScore and a 53% audience score. In other words, Savage’s horror film has fared worse with moviegoers than one of the most notorious superhero flops in recent memory.

The D+ grade is especially rare. It’s the lowest CinemaScore for any film since Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ in September 2024, and it signals that word of mouth is unlikely to help the movie in the weeks ahead.

OTHER MOMMY is officially the worst received wide release of 2026. It has currently 19% from critics, 47% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and a historically low D+ on CinemaScore. How bad is this? MADAME WEB got C+ CinemaScore and 53% on RT from audiences https://t.co/s3gTbINz3H

— Global Box Office (@GlobalBoxOffice) October 10, 2026

The story follows an 8-year-old girl who encounters a sinister entity that looks and sounds exactly like her mother. Chastain plays a dual role as both the loving mom Ursula and the nightmarish doppelgänger tormenting her family.

Arabella Olivia Clark stars as young Bela, with Jay Duplass, Arian Moayed, Dichen Lachman and Karen Allen rounding out the cast. The R-rated film runs 1 hour and 33 minutes.

Universal held the film back from most critics until the last minute, and early viewers at advance screenings reportedly called it Chastain’s worst film in years. That pattern of skepticism is now playing out online, where audiences have been mocking the film.

Even the kindest reviews come with caveats. The Hollywood Reporter praised Chastain for fully committing to the role while calling the overall film flimsy, and The Film Verdict credited her solid dual performance but felt excessive jump scares and chaotic storytelling undercut the premise.

RogerEbert.com gave the movie 2.5 stars, describing it as a breakneck genre exercise with a story simple enough to fit on a cocktail napkin. IndieWire offered a C+, noting that Savage’s appetite for spectacle sometimes outpaces his patience for storytelling.

Here’s the twist: ‘Other Mommy’ is still making money. The film grossed $12.6 million on Friday, including Thursday previews, from 3,200 North American theaters, and it’s heading toward a roughly $28 million opening weekend.

The official trailer for ‘OTHER MOMMY,’ starring Jessica Chastain, has been released. In theaters on October 9. https://t.co/8E2MGiT8W2

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) July 21, 2026

That figure would comfortably beat the studio’s $20 million projection, especially impressive for a film with a $19 million budget. It’s also on track to top the weekend, ahead of ‘The Social Reckoning’, which is off to a quieter start.

The real question is whether that momentum can last. With a D+ CinemaScore and poor word of mouth, a steep second-weekend drop seems likely, even with Halloween just around the corner.

For now, ‘Other Mommy’ stands as a strange case of a horror film that audiences rushed to see and then walked away from disappointed. Whether it becomes a cult favorite or a cautionary tale remains to be seen.

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