‘Other Mommy’ Will Win The Box Office With Catastrophic Review Scores

Other Mommy is one of the worst-reviewed movies of all of 2026, but it is still going to win the weekend box office with its awful Rotten Tomatoes score.

Universal

It has been an unusually great year for horror with entries like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Backrooms, Resident Evil and of course, Obsession. So that’s why it’s surprising to see a big new mainstream entry arrive and be just utterly terrible. Meet Other Mommy.

Other Mommy (how did they not call this Other Mother?) stars Jessica Chastain, who plays the mother of a little girl who also appears as a demonic version of herself, complete with weird facial and body contortions. I’ve certainly heard worse concepts for a horror film, but Other Mommy has worse review scores compared to nearly every other horror movie out this year, arriving with a 17% Rotten Tomatoes score. And comparatively speaking, between its director and star, it’s a more significant achievement than the others, given their pedigree.

However, Other Mommy is set to make at least $20 million domestically this weekend, according to estimates, and will likely recoup its low budget instantly. That could be around triple what the higher-profile The Social Reckoning will make, say those same estimates.

I was amazed to see that this was directed by Rob Savage, who did the excellent horror film Host in 2020, which, with 100 reviews in has a 98% Rotten Tomatoes critic score, genuinely one of the best in the genre on the site. That was about a different kind of demonic presence, one that manifests during a Zoom call (an appropriate film for the COVID era).

The same could be said for Jessica Chastain, who has a host of good projects under her belt like Molly’s Game, A Most Violent Game, Interstellar and The Martian under her belt. It seemed like she was going to give a unique horror performance here, but it doesn’t work. None of it works. Here are the other films that compare to Other Mommy with similarly horrible horror scores in 2026:

• Psycho Killer – 9% critic score
• Sleepwalker – 14% critic score
• Other Mommy – 17% critic score
• The Stranger: Chapter 3 – 18% critic score
• Return to Silent Hill – 18% critic score
• Ice Cream Man – 25% critic score
• Scream 7 – 30% critic score
• Passenger – 45% critic score
• Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – 45% critic score
• Insidious: Out of the Further – 57%

So yes, Other Mommy is currently the third-worst-reviewed horror movie on this list for the entire year. And again, Chastain is probably the biggest star out of any of these, short of some Scream 7 cast members, perhaps. Even then, I’d consider her more relevant than the likes of Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox in 2026.

I am wondering if this is a “so bad it’s good” situation. We can see what critics have to say:

Variety – “Among the most limp and ineffectual works to grace the screen this year, misfiring in every direction, including and especially its tone.”

Bloody Disgusting – “Other Mommy is so flat and devoid of tension that by film’s end, you’re more likely to laugh or groan at the absurd lengths this family will go to avoid therapy than root for their triumph over an ultimately forgettable demonic entity.”

I’m not sure I can bring myself to even watch this one out of morbid curiosity, but it appears a lot of other people will this weekend. Good luck.

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