Other Mommy Opened to $27.5M With a D+. The Social Reckoning Opened to $5.5M With a B-.

Here's a weekend box office split screen that should bother everyone who makes movies for a living. Jessica Chastain's horror film Other Mommy took the top spot with $27.5 million domestic and roughly $45 million worldwide, on a reported $19 million budget. Its CinemaScore, the grade audiences hand pollsters on opening night, was a D+. That's the lowest since Megalopolis two years ago.

Meanwhile, Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, the long-gestating sequel to The Social Network, opened to $5.5 million in fifth place. Its CinemaScore was a B-. Reviews were mixed, audiences were fine with it, and almost nobody showed up.

Read those two results side by side and the lesson isn't "audiences have bad taste." It's that opening weekend and quality have almost nothing to do with each other anymore. Horror is the last genre where a premise and a trailer can still sell a ticket by themselves. Other Mommy is a doppelganger-haunts-your-kid pitch you can explain in one sentence, and one-sentence pitches are what get people off the couch. The D+ tells you the movie didn't deliver, which means the second weekend is going to be ugly. But the studio already has its money back and then some. For a $19 million movie, that's a win regardless of what happens next.

Aaron Sorkin. Photo: Dominick D / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Featured image: Jessica Chastain. Photo: Harald Krichel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Social Reckoning has the opposite problem. By most accounts it's decent. But it's a sequel to a 2010 film about a technology that's now so familiar that the "reveal" isn't one. The Social Network opened to $22.6 million in 2010, back when Facebook was still a story people were curious about. In 2026, the pitch is "Mark Zuckerberg, again, but with Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison," and that's a hard sell to anyone who has been living inside the consequences for fifteen years. Films about current events and social issues are a tough sell right now. Nobody wants homework on a Friday night, even if Sorkin writes the homework.

The wider picture isn't pretty either. Verity took second, Resident Evil (which we covered when the Cregger reboot news broke) held third, and the market keeps rewarding what's cheap, scary, and easy to explain. Paul Dergarabedian, a box office analyst, put it mildly: "You don't always know what's going to connect with audiences."

True. But you do know what doesn't need to connect with audiences to make money: a $19 million horror movie. Expect more of them, and fewer Sorkin-scale bets on grown-up conversation pieces.