‘Other Mommy’ Opens With $27.5M. It Still Feels Like a Massive Missed Opportunity.

Universal Pictures and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster’s Other Mommy is one of the most fascinating horror releases in years. Here’s a movie with outstanding trailers and TV spots, a brutal audience response, and an opening weekend that still looks pretty damn good.

The latest estimates put Rob Savage’s horror film at approximately $27.5 million domestically, despite a D+ CinemaScore, against a reported $19 million budget.

That’s a solid opening. It’s also nowhere near what I thought this movie could become.

From the initial trailer drop through release, the marketing materials were outstanding. I want to be specific about that: the trailers, the TV spots, the footage they chose to put in front of us. They sold a jump-scare frenzy that looked like accessible, gateway horror, with Jessica Chastain (Mama, It Chapter Two) helping bring everyone into the theater.

Even with its R rating, it had that scary-but-fun look that suggested you could take a whole group with different tolerances for horror and have a great time. Clips kept circulating. Every new spot seemed to have another image or line worth sharing.

I was sold. I said as much earlier this week, when I predicted an opening above $30 million.

Privately, if it was as good as it looked, I could see $40–45 million. That was my own optimistic scenario, not an industry tracking figure. With strong reviews and people walking out telling their friends they had to see it, I thought this could become one of the biggest horror movies of the year.

Then people actually saw it.

A D+ CinemaScore is brutal. TheWrap also reported a 20% critics score and 47% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes in its Saturday coverage. This wasn’t the reaction I expected from a movie whose trailers worked that well. Credit to the people who put those materials together: they made this look like an event.

But I also think some of the hate is hyperbolic. It’s not bad.