Other Mommy is set to open at #1 with $20M-plus as Verity faces its C+ second weekend

With Halloween three weeks out and nothing new in the genre since Resident Evil, Other Mommy has the calendar almost entirely to itself. It’s a Blumhouse and Atomic Monster production with James Wan producing, based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, and it has Jessica Chastain playing both the mother and the thing pretending to be her. The trailer has been everywhere, has been getting genuinely positive and spooked reactions from people, and it runs a tight 93 minutes, which means plenty of showtimes.

The tracking is where it gets complicated, since we’ve seen this one jump a little all over the place in the last month. Industry numbers were as high as $35M a couple of weeks ago, and our own range climbed from $18–24M at the end of September to $25–33M this week. The trades have since gone the other way, with most now sitting right around $20M, and Boxoffice Pro’s panel is lower again at $17–22M. On top of that, reviews were kept till late - they only just started trickling in as this piece went live, so no score yet, but it’s looking like it’s not going to be a critical darling based on the first couple we read.

The comps cover that whole tracking spread. Rob Savage’s last film, The Boogeyman, opened to $12.4M in 2023 and got to $43.2M. Chastain’s last horror movie was Mama, which opened to $28.4M back in 2013 and finished at $71.6M. And this exact slot has been reliable for the genre two years running: Smile 2 opened to $23.0M in 2024 and Black Phone 2 to $27.3M last October, with both ending up around $70–77M. Other Mommy is an original with no franchise behind it, but it has a bigger star and a cleaner hook than The Boogeyman did, so the Smile 2 and Black Phone 2 numbers could be doable, unless bad reviews nuke the buzz in the last 24 hours leading into the weekend.

It also follows a very strong run for the genre. Resident Evil opened to $60.2M three weeks ago and is at $127.9M, Obsession turned a $17.2M start into $263.5M over the summer, and Weapons showed last August that an original can open to $43.5M when the reviews and the buzz line up. That’s on top of $100M + runs for the latest in the Scream and Scary Movie franchises this year too. Other Mommy isn’t tracking anywhere near those levels, and assuming reviews end up mixed like it’s looking now, we don’t see it spiking to $30M like what looked possible a couple of weeks ago. That being said, $20M+ is still very much doable here. Whatever it opens to, it wins the weekend, and the second weekend is where we’ll find out what it really is. Send Help opened to $19.1M in January and legged out to $64.7M on good word of mouth, and that’s the kind of run a start in the low $20s could turn into if audiences like it.

Verity had a great opening, and now comes the part we flagged on Sunday. A C+ CinemaScore is the lowest for any Colleen Hoover adaptation, and it’s coming off a weekend that was driven heavily by fans who bought early. Its first weekdays were fine without being special: $2.4M on Monday and $3.6M on Tuesday, a 48% bump that was smaller than what Heart of the Beast and Forgotten Island managed. That takes it to $38.0M after five days, already close to its $40M budget.

Hoover films tend to drop around half in their second weekends. It Ends with Us fell 52%, Reminders of Him 55%, and Regretting You held best at 43%, and none of those had a grade this low. The Bride! had the same grade and lost 70%, while Wuthering Heights opened to about the same number in February and dropped 60%. A 50% drop would mean $16M and a 60% drop would mean $13M, and with Other Mommy skewing toward the same younger female audience, plus so-so word of mouth and natural front loading due to the built in book fans coming first weekend, the steeper end looks more likely to us. Either way it stays on track for the $70M+ we talked about on Sunday.

The closest thing to a preview of this weekend is Practical Magic 2, which opened to $30.0M a month ago with a similar audience, fell 59% in its second weekend and is at $65.5M after four. Verity started a little higher and has a much smaller budget, so even that kind of drop leaves it in good shape. We’re expecting around a 60% drop, and anything under that we’d actually count as a good hold, all things considered.

A week after Digger, here’s another expensive-looking adult drama from a big-name filmmaker that tracking says very few people are planning to see. The Social Reckoning is Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network, which opened to $22.4M in 2010, held 31% in its second weekend and finished at $97.0M with a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s worth noting that for many people, this writer included, The Social Network was a near perfect film, that has aged almost as well as WALL·E (read: impeccably well) and the idea of doing a sequel to it feels outrageous.

But sixteen years later, here we are, and this sequel is tracking at $6–10M, and that range has been coming down, as it started the month at $7–12M. The reviews are just fine at 64%, which is good enough to avoid a Digger-style reception (although Digger stabilized at 51% in the end), but a long way short of what made the original a must-see, and this is exactly the type of movie that needs good reviews to get people to the cinema. It also doesn’t have David Fincher, widely considered one of the all-time directors of our generation (although sadly stolen by Netflix for the last 10 years), and its cast, as good as Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White are, hasn’t opened a film at this level before and doesn’t hold a candle to the cast of the first film (Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Armie Hammer, and a blink and you miss her Dakota Johnson).

Digger got to $8.0M last weekend with Tom Cruise on the poster, and we have a hard time seeing this one beating that by much. The hope would be that an older audience finds it over the next few weeks the way they did with the first film, although that one had the reviews and the awards run to keep it going. Sorkin’s films as a director have never been big openers either. Molly’s Game, his directing debut, started in limited release and finished at $28.8M domestic. At this point, double digits this weekend would be a little victory.

Resident Evil has had the horror audience to itself for three weeks, and that ends on Friday. The 45% drop last weekend was exactly what it needed, and its Tuesday was down 46% from the Tuesday before, so it’s been steady. Weapons fell just 32% in its fourth weekend on the way to $151.6M, but it didn’t have a new R-rated horror film opening on top of it. Resident Evil needs about $22M more to reach $150M, and we still say it gets there.

Of the three films that opened two weeks ago, this is clearly the one audiences are sticking with. Heart of the Beast jumped 67% from Monday to Tuesday, the biggest bump in the top five, and it has now passed $100M worldwide. It’s also pulled clearly ahead of Primetime, which opened just $1.2M behind it and now trails by more than $4M after two weekends. Neither of this weekend’s openers is going after its older audience, and Monday’s holiday should help on Sunday. A drop of around 35% gets it to about $7M and keeps it in the mix for third place, with our model at $60–68M for the run.

Forgotten Island is the only PG film in the top ten, and with a lot of schools off on Monday, this is the weekend it should post its best hold so far. Its Tuesday was up 64% on Monday and it has an A CinemaScore, so the audience that’s seen it likes it. The problem is still the size of that audience: it’s at $24.9M domestic and $39.9M worldwide on an $80M budget, and it needs to hold under 40% from here to get anywhere near $50M.

After falling 58% last weekend, Primetime should settle down a bit here, as the big second-weekend drops for A24 films usually come from the fans showing up early. Another 50% or so puts it around $4M and close to $42M by Sunday, with The Drama and Talk to Me still within reach by the end of the run. On a $15M budget, it’s already a clear win.

Digger’s weekdays were about as good as could be hoped, with Tuesday up 50%, but it’s at just $9.9M after five days and The Social Reckoning is about to take what’s left of its audience. The Bride! fell 70% in its second weekend from a similar start, while One Battle After Another held at 50%. We’re expecting something in between, which would leave it around $3.5M and on its way to a finish of about $17–18M.