Universal Pictures' horror release 'Other Mommy' claimed the top spot at the domestic box office this weekend, pulling in approximately $27.5 million from 3,200 North American theaters despite savage reviews and a dismal audience response. The $19 million-budgeted film, directed by Rob Savage and starring Jessica Chastain as a sinister entity that appears in a young girl's closet, beat Universal's own $20 million opening projection.
The win came despite a D+ CinemaScore from opening-weekend audiences — the lowest grade for any film since Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis' in September 2024 — along with a 19 percent critics' score and a 46 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, critic Richard Lawson called the film 'an attractive but mostly vacuous collection of jumpy bits and half-baked mythology.' Universal credited buzz from the film's trailer, which first screened ahead of 'The Odyssey,' with helping drive the strong launch.
Sorkin's Sequel Falls Short
Sony Pictures' 'The Social Reckoning,' Aaron Sorkin's directorial follow-up to 'The Social Network,' opened to just $5.5 million from 2,606 theaters — below the studio's already modest $7 million expectation. The $30 million film earned a B- CinemaScore. Sorkin, who won an Academy Award for writing 'The Social Network' screenplay, stepped into the director's chair in place of David Fincher for this companion piece, which follows a Facebook employee played by Mikey Madison teaming with a journalist played by Jeremy Allen White to expose troubling truths about the company; Jeremy Strong plays an older Mark Zuckerberg. By contrast, 'The Social Network,' starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, opened at No. 1 with $22.4 million in October 2010 and went on to earn $224 million globally, backed by a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. 'The Social Reckoning' holds a 54 percent critics' score and a 71 percent audience score. THR chief film critic David Rooney called it an 'engrossing whistleblower thriller.'
The soft opening raises questions for other upcoming films centered on controversial tech figures, including the Elizabeth Holmes documentary 'You Can See Everything' and Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI-focused 'Artificial.' Bleecker Street's Alex Gibney-directed Elon Musk documentary, 'Musk,' opened in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles, collecting about $68,900, or $17,225 per screen. 'They seem to have a better home on streaming than on the big screen,' David A. Gross, who runs the FranchiseRe box office newsletter, told THR. 'Even when they're well made, they're not very cinematic in terms of what really works theatrically, which involves some kind of visual or emotional experience.'
Limited Releases and Holdovers
A24's 'Misty Green,' directed by Chris Rock and starring Rosalind Eleazar, Adam Driver and Daniel Kaluuya as a fading actress seeking a comeback, earned $85,716 from six locations in New York and Los Angeles. David Rooney described it as 'the work of a mature director who knows what he wants to say.' The documentary 'NAZA,' which examines Israel's military operations in Gaza, brought in an estimated $247,000 from 72 locations; the Israeli-American Council staged a protest Friday outside the Laemmle NoHo 7 in North Hollywood tied to the film's screening.
Amazon MGM's 'Verity,' the Colleen Hoover adaptation starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett and directed by Michael Showalter, slid to second place with $11.4 million, a roughly 64 percent drop, for a domestic total of $53.8 million. Sony's 'Resident Evil,' directed by Zach Cregger and starring Austin Abrams, added $8.3 million in its fourth weekend for a $138.5 million domestic total, crossing $300 million globally with a $320.2 million worldwide cume — the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. Paramount's 'Heart of the Beast,' starring Brad Pitt and directed by David Ayer, added $7.1 million in its third weekend, bringing its domestic haul to $49.6 million.
Overall, the weekend generated an estimated $88 million domestically, per Rentrak, up 23.6 percent over the comparable weekend last year, when 'Tron: Ares' opened to $33.5 million. The 2026 domestic box office passed $8 billion on Friday and stood at $8.077 billion through Sunday, up 19.6 percent from the $6.7 billion recorded at the same point in 2025. Still, FranchiseRe noted the frame came in about 27 percent below the combined pre-pandemic averages for equivalent weekends in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Next weekend brings the releases of 'Street Fighter,' 'Whalefall' and 'Sense and Sensibility.'
Photo: Logo du film, CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
