Opinion: ‘Other Mommy’ Proves Hiding Horror From Critics Works, and That’s Exactly the Problem
Here is the most uncomfortable box office fact of the 2026 Halloween season: the scariest-looking horror movie of the fall skipped U.S. press screenings, earned a D+ CinemaScore, carries a 19% critics score, and is still a hit. Universal and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster's Other Mommy made roughly $27.5 million in its opening weekend on a reported $19 million budget, and three weekends later it is closing in on $95 million worldwide. By every spreadsheet measure, hiding a horror movie from critics just worked.
That's exactly why horror fans should stop rewarding it. This isn't a hit piece on Jessica Chastain, Rob Savage or a trailer that legitimately freaked out half the internet this summer. It's an argument about a release strategy, the one where a studio decides you shouldn't know what a movie is like until your money is already spent. Below: what actually happened with Other Mommy , why the trick keeps working, what it costs the genre, the best case for the studio's side, and why we think the bill is already coming due.
The Trailer That Sold the Movie
Give the marketing team its due. The first trailer premiered in theaters ahead of The Odyssey in late July and went online July 21. One shot of the entity folded into an impossible shape beneath a kitchen table became the clip everybody sent each other, and a chunk of viewers argued it should have come with a warning. The final trailer, below, leaned even harder on that imagery. It was a perfect two-minute horror product.
The movie behind it adapts Josh Malerman's 2024 novel Incidents Around the House , from a script by Nathan Elston, with James Wan producing. Chastain plays both Ursula, the mother of eight-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), and the closet-dwelling thing the girl names Other Mommy. Jay Duplass plays the father, Karen Allen the grandmother. It's rated R for bloody violence and language, runs a lean 93 minutes, was shot in Dublin between May and July 2025, and was originally dated for May 8, 2026 before Universal slid it into the Halloween corridor.
Photo: Josh Malerman via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
What Universal Actually Did
Here's the part that matters. As opening day approached, Other Mommy still had not screened for American press. The review embargo technically lifted, so anyone who had seen it could post, but the only people who had were a scattering of international critics and influencers. World of Reel rounded up the early verdicts on Oct. 8, the night previews began, and they were rough: one-and-a-half and two stars out of five, plus one outlet calling it the worst Chastain movie in years. U.S. critics mostly caught it with paying audiences on opening day.
The studio never said why. It doesn't have to. Nobody hides a movie from reviewers because they're worried the reviews will be too glowing. When the critics finally weighed in, the score settled at 19%, which Rotten Tomatoes' own weekend recap noted is the lowest of the year for any film opening in more than 3,000 theaters.
By the Numbers: Why the Trick Keeps Working
Opening weekend was a win, full stop. Other Mommy debuted at No. 1 from 3,365 theaters with about $27.5 million, beating public tracking that had hovered around $20 million. It opened in 50 overseas markets at the same time for a global start of roughly $45.2 million. According to the Associated Press, the crowd split evenly by gender and about two-thirds were between 18 and 34. Universal's domestic distribution chief Jim Orr summed up the turnout by saying "everybody turned out for it."
- Budget: a reported $19 million.
- Opening weekend: about $27.5 million domestic, $45.2 million worldwide.
- CinemaScore: D+.
- Second weekend: about $8.3 million, down 70%.
- Third weekend: $3.8 million, $51.5 million domestic total, close to $95 million worldwide.
This is an old playbook. In January 2012, The Devil Inside skipped critics, opened to around $34 million on a film Paramount had picked up for $1 million, and walked away with an F CinemaScore. Horror is the only genre where that move works this reliably, because the audience shows up on Friday for the concept, the trailer and the date-night scare, not for the reviews. The opening weekend is the business. Everything after it is a bonus.
The Bill Comes Due on Weekend Two
But look at what happened once real people saw it. That D+ is the same grade audiences gave Hereditary , and before anyone points that out as proof CinemaScore is meaningless: Hereditary divided people because it was relentless and strange. Other Mommy divided people because, by most accounts, it was neither. Savage reportedly bragged that the film lands a jump scare roughly every two minutes, around 50 in all. That's a promise a trailer can keep for 120 seconds and a feature has a much harder time keeping for 93 minutes.
The second weekend fell 70%, with Friday alone reportedly down close to 80% once previews are counted. Now compare it to Zach Cregger's Resident Evil , which dipped only about 36% in its fifth weekend, has crossed $361 million worldwide, and just passed Cregger's own Weapons on the domestic chart. Or Clayface , which won this past weekend with $24 million and a rare A- grade for a horror film. Horror movies that respect the audience get a second and third weekend. Horror movies that ambush the audience get one.
Photo: Jay Duplass by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
What It Costs the Genre
The real damage isn't to Other Mommy 's legs. It's to trust. Every time a horror audience gets burned by a movie that was kept in the dark, the casual moviegoer learns the lesson that horror is a gamble. And the movies that pay for that lesson are the ones that didn't do anything wrong.
Look at the rest of October. Brian Duffield's Whalefall , with Josh Brolin and a 71% critics score, cost a reported $60 million and opened to roughly $8 million. Wicker , sitting at 94%, opened to $5.7 million. Jordan Downey's The Cycle , a movie Stephen King went out of his way to praise, went straight to Shudder. The good stuff is out there, and it's being screened, reviewed and recommended. But when the loudest horror hit of the month is one its own studio didn't trust critics with, it trains people to tune out the conversation about quality altogether. Why read reviews of horror movies if the industry itself treats them as irrelevant?
It also shapes what gets made next. Studios greenlight from results, and the result here says a viral 20-second scare is worth more than a finished film people actually like. That's how you get a pipeline of movies built backward from their trailers.
Who's Behind It, and Why This One Stings
What makes this frustrating is the talent involved. Savage made his name with Host , the 2020 Zoom-séance movie that turned lockdown into one of the best Shudder originals ever, then followed it with Dashcam under his Blumhouse deal. His 2023 Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman was originally headed to Hulu until a strong December 2022 test screening convinced Disney to put it in theaters, where it made $82.3 million worldwide on a $35 million budget with a B- CinemaScore and 60% from critics. That movie was screened for critics. It didn't need hiding.
Chastain, meanwhile, has a good genre track record of her own, from Mama to Crimson Peak to It Chapter Two. Malerman is the author of Bird Box. Wan built half of modern studio horror. These are people who have made, sold and stood behind good horror. A team like that deserves a studio confident enough to show its work, and if the studio wasn't confident, that's information audiences deserved too. Savage already has his next one lined up, Molepeople with LaKeith Stanfield, set for Aug. 27, 2027 from Paramount. We're rooting for it.
The Other Side
The case for Universal is real, and it deserves a fair hearing. First, studios don't owe critics anything; screenings are a marketing tool, not a public service. Second, horror critics and horror audiences disagree constantly, and plenty of fan favorites were trashed on release. Third, the math is undeniable: a $19 million movie heading toward $95 million worldwide is a success, and the Rotten Tomatoes recap itself called it one for Universal and Blumhouse. That profit funds riskier projects, including weird originals that might never get made otherwise.
And maybe some people just wanted a loud, jumpy movie for a Friday night in October, got exactly that, and had a fine time. That's a legitimate way to enjoy horror, and nobody should feel bad for it.
All true. But "it made money" was also true of The Devil Inside , and nobody remembers that movie as anything but a cautionary tale. The question isn't whether the strategy is profitable. It's whether horror fans want a genre where the most profitable strategy is keeping us uninformed.
Bottom Line
Skipping press screenings is a studio telling you what it thinks of its own movie. Other Mommy got a great trailer, a great opening and then a 70% collapse once word got out, which tells you the audience figured it out too, just one weekend too late. The fix isn't complicated: when a horror movie hasn't screened for critics by Thursday, wait for Saturday. Let the people who saw it Friday tell you. And spend the ticket money you saved on Resident Evil , Clayface or Wicker while they're still in theaters.
Your turn: Did you see Other Mommy , and do you feel like you got what the trailer promised? Would you skip a horror movie that wasn't screened for critics, or do reviews not matter to you at all? Tell us we're wrong.
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Header photo via Wikimedia Commons(free license), cropped with text added. This is an opinion piece; box office figures are studio estimates and reported numbers as of Oct. 25, 2026.
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