Other Mommy To Cook Up $20M Opening, Social Reckoning Wont Have Many Friends – U.S. Box Office Preview

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With potential MLB playoff games this weekend in addition to the NFL in full swing, the majors have booked the upcoming box office weekend adequately without any mega-tentpole fare, instead offering lower-budget pics aimed at specific demos.

Sometimes during the tricky days of early October, studios will go with a tentpole and watch a film crater as men flee to sports, especially if it doesn’t have electric word of mouth, i.e., last October’s Tron Ares ($33.2M). That wasn’t the case in October 2021 when theatrical was coming out of Covid with a backlog of big tentpoles like Dune, No Time to Die and Halloween Kills.

Horror is always safe at this time in the run-up to Halloween, and this frame we have the net $19M R-rated Jessica Chastain-led Other Mommy from Blumhouse Atomic Monster/Universal. Directed by Rob Savage, it is eyeing a No. 1 debut around $20M at 3,200 sites, which would be solid. Pic has the added advantage of PLFs. No Rotten Tomatoes critics score yet.

Horror has largely been good to Chastain at the domestic box office. Her first movie with director Andy Muschietti, 2013’s Mama, opened to $28.4M domestic via Universal and legged out to $71.6M stateside and $146.4M global. Her second with the filmmaker, 2019’s Stephen King franchise IP It Chapter Two, bowed to $91M in North America and finaled at $211.6M U.S., $473.1M worldwide.

In Other Mommy, Chastain has a freaky, arguably sinister spiritual doppelgänger who is causing havoc with her 8-year old daughter and a marriage that’s already on the rocks. Pic’s campaign kicked off July 17 with the first in-theater trailer attached to The Odyssey. The online trailer was timed to the pic’s one-sheet unveil and was further juiced as the pre-roll to Obsession’s debut on Peacock, tallying 242M global views.

Showtimes start at 2 p.m. in North America on Thursday. Best demos are women under 25 and men over 25 in first choice, with both demos ahead of The End of Oak Street ($21M opening) at the same point in time.

The offshore footprint will be staggered with a limited bow in Mexico, UK and Australia and other territories like France, Netherlands, Korea and Japan going later.

Since taking the reins as a director, Aaron Sorkin has been asked on press tours if he’d make a sequel to his Oscar-winning The Social Network. He finally has with The Social Reckoning, which follows Jeremy Strong (not Jesse Eisenberg) as Facebook architect Mark Zuckerberg embroiled in a crisis: whistleblower France Haugen (Oscar winner Mikey Madison) is leaking internal company docs to a WSJ reporter (Jeremy Allen White) about the social media platform’s ill ways in misinformation and its negative influence on teens.

Critics are so-so right now on it at 64% fresh, well below Social Network‘s 96% certified fresh. Quietly stealing thunder, and not even opening until Christmas Day, is Neon’s Luca Guadagnino OpenAI movie Artificial, which just world premiered at the New York Film Festival and drummed up platinum early reviews hailing the movie as a pseudo-like follow-up to Social Network; Artificial stars Social Network‘s Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

With headlines about the threat of AI on humanity, Artificial is looking like the more prescient film over the look in the rearview mirror that is Social Reckoning. All of this lends itself to a mid-single-digit opening at 2,200 theaters for Social Reckoning, perhaps around $8M (where Tom Cruise’s $160M Digger flopped). The good news for Social Reckoning is that at a net production cost of $30M-$42M before global P&A, it’s significantly cheaper than Digger, and it is 50% financed by Alcon. Digger didn’t have a co-financier.

Previews start at 4 p.m. for the R-rated Social Reckoning on Thursday. Guys over 25 are the best in first choice, about the same as Allen White’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere last year which opened to $8.8M domestic, and finaled at $22.6M domestic and more than $45M global.

Overseas, the hope is that Social Reckoning gets sophisticated audiences’ word of mouth in Europe. Pic will have a 92% footprint offshore with a $6M opening abroad on par with other dramas such as ultimate 2015 Oscar Best Picture winner Spotlight and the 2019 Fox News exposé Bombshell.

Also opening this weekend in North America is Angel Studios’ western Angel and the Badman starring Tommy Lee Jones, Neal McDonough and Zachary Levi at 2,000 theaters. There’s also Cineverse’s 20th anniversary rerelease of Guillermo del Toro’s three-time Oscar winner Pan’s Labyrinth going via Fathom at 1,008 sites. That pic’s current domestic B.O. stands at $37.6M.

Meanwhile, Amazon MGM Studios’ second weekend of Verity should decline at least 60% and potentially more off its C+ CinemaScore for around $12M. The feature take of the Colleen Hoover novel currently counts $37.9M at the domestic B.O. through Tuesday.

Neon has its Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fjord going in four L.A. and NYC theaters this weekend.