Other Mommy opened to $27.5m on a D+. History points to $63m

Six horror films that CinemaScore audiences graded D+ or worse finished, at the median, on 2.28 times their opening weekend. Apply that to Other Mommy, which opened to an estimated $27.5m this weekend with a D+ of its own, and Jessica Chastain's film ends its North American run on about $63m. That would be 3.3 times what it cost.

The grade made the headlines. The arithmetic says Universal can live with it.

How we got to $63m

CinemaScore polls audiences on opening night, and the D+ handed to director Rob Savage's film is the lowest grade for any release since Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis in September 2024, the Associated Press reported. Most coverage stopped there. We wanted to know what a grade like that has cost in dollars.

So we took six wide-release horror films with a published grade of D+ or lower, pulled each one's opening weekend and final domestic total from Box Office Mojo, and divided the second by the first.

• Hereditary (2018, D+): $13.6m opening, $44.1m final, 3.25 times
• mother! (2017, F): $7.5m opening, $17.8m final, 2.36 times
• It Comes at Night (2017, D): $6.0m opening, $14.0m final, 2.34 times
• The Turning (2020, F): $7.0m opening, $15.5m final, 2.23 times
• The Grudge (2020, F): $11.4m opening, $21.2m final, 1.86 times
• The Devil Inside (2012, F): $33.7m opening, $53.3m final, 1.58 times

The median sits between The Turning and It Comes at Night, at 2.28. Multiply $27.5m by that and you get $62.7m. The worst case on the list gives $43.4m. The best gives $89.3m, and nobody should plan around the best. Even the floor is 2.3 times the reported budget, which is the detail that matters most to the people who paid for it.

A caveat, stated plainly. CinemaScore keeps no public archive of its grades, as Verdict noted when mother! got its F, so this is a sample of films whose grades were widely reported and not a census. Megalopolis, which is not a horror film, managed 1.90 times: $4.0m to $7.6m.

Horror is marked harder than any other genre, which is why the sample exists at all. When Hereditary received its D+ in 2018, W Magazine counted 12 horror films among the 13 most recent to be given an F. People who buy a ticket to be frightened are hard to please.

The one comparison that should worry Universal

Size is the problem with our own list. Five of the six films opened below $14m, where a small and curious audience can keep turning up for weeks. Only The Devil Inside opened bigger than Other Mommy, and it is the film at the bottom.

Paramount's found-footage exorcism picture took $33.7m in January 2012, got an F, and then lost 76% of its audience in its second weekend, falling to $7.9m, ComingSoon reported at the time. Big openings built on marketing have further to fall.

Hereditary, the one that tripled, is the flattering outlier. Take it out and the median of the remaining five is 2.23, which puts Other Mommy on $61m. The forecast barely moves. That is the reassuring part.

Others are gloomier. JoBlo expects a second-weekend fall of at least 70%, and Dread Central calls a $55m to $60m final plausible but not guaranteed. The critics will not help: the film sits at 18% on Rotten Tomatoes from 57 reviews.

There is a fresh example in the same chart. Amazon MGM's Verity, graded C+, dropped 64% in its second weekend to $11.5m, although the studio put part of that down to Hurricane Isaias keeping cinemas in the south-eastern United States quiet, according to TheWrap.

What the opening weekend already shows

The front-loading has started. Other Mommy took $12.6m on Friday, Variety reported, a figure that includes $3.6m from Thursday previews, per The Hollywood Reporter. That is 46% of the weekend in one day, leaving $14.9m for Saturday and Sunday combined. Resident Evil did much the same thing last month, as we reported, and it is still in the top three.

None of which makes the opening a disappointment. Universal had projected $20m. The film came in 37.5% above the studio's own number, from 3,365 cinemas. Jim Orr, Universal's head of domestic distribution, told the Associated Press that "everybody turned out for it. It wasn't just one particular demographic." About two-thirds of the audience was aged 18 to 34.

The cost is where the outlets part company. The Associated Press and TheWrap put the production budget at $19m; Variety has $18m. On the higher figure the opening weekend alone is 1.45 times the budget, before a $17.6m start from 50 overseas markets lifts the worldwide total to about $45m.

A D+ is a verdict on the film. On a $19m budget it is not a verdict on the business, and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster has built a company on knowing the difference. Compare the weekend's other stories: Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning opened to $5.5m, slightly under the $6m we wrote about on Saturday, and Tom Cruise's Digger fell 60% to $3.2m with a break-even target it will not reach.

The outlets do not agree on the weekend as a whole, either. Deadline has all films at $83.4m, up 19% on the same weekend in 2025. TheWrap has $88m to $90m, up 24%.

Final figures arrive on Monday. The test comes on the weekend of 16 October, and the number to watch is $8.25m: anything below it means Other Mommy has fallen more than 70%, and anything below $6.6m means it has matched The Devil Inside.