‘Other Mommy’ Hits Digital Today: The D+ Horror Hit That Made $110M+ on a $19M Budget, and Everything You Need to Know
Critics shredded it. Opening-night audiences handed it a D+ CinemaScore. And Other Mommy still walked out of theaters with more than $110 million worldwide on a reported budget of under $20 million. Starting today, Tuesday, Nov. 10, Rob Savage's Jessica Chastain nightmare is available to buy or rent at home, which means the biggest argument in horror this fall is about to move from the multiplex to your living room couch.
That makes this a good moment to take stock. Below you'll find everything confirmed about the digital release (prices, platforms, bonus features and the disc date), the people who made it, the long road from Josh Malerman's novel to the screen, the numbers that made it a hit, and our take on what a critic-proof, audience-split, wildly profitable movie actually tells us about where studio horror is heading.
Watch the Trailers
Universal first played the teaser only in theaters, in front of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey , before putting it online on July 21. Here it is, followed by the second trailer and the studio's behind-the-scenes featurette on Chastain's transformation.
The Details: How to Watch Other Mommy at Home
- Buy: $24.99 on Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Prime Video and YouTube.
- Rent: $19.99 for a 48-hour window (the Prime Video price, per Decider).
- Physical: 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD arrive Dec. 29.
- Rating and runtime: R for some bloody violence and language; 1 hour 33 minutes, per Rotten Tomatoes.
- Streaming: no Peacock date has been announced. Universal's recent pattern points to early 2027, but treat any specific date you see online as a guess.
Digital buyers at participating retailers also get extras, which Dread Central and /Film both list: four deleted or alternate scenes ("Alternate Car Confrontation," "Dancing at Grandma's," "Checking Bela's Room" and "Taking a Bath") and three featurettes. "Effecting Fear" covers the visual effects, "A Family in Pieces" focuses on the family at the center of the story and the performances, and "Breaking Rules with Other Mommy" digs into the film's point of view and the horror conventions it tries to sidestep. The same package is expected on the discs.
If you skipped it in theaters, the setup is simple. Eight-year-old Bela (newcomer Arabella Olivia Clark) lives in a house strained by her parents' failing marriage. Each night, something she calls Other Mommy comes out of her closet and asks to be let inside. Chastain plays both Bela's real mother, Ursula, and the thing wearing her face; Jay Duplass plays her dad, with Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen rounding out the cast, per Universal's release announcement.
Who's Behind It
Rob Savage, director
Savage is one of the more interesting career arcs in modern horror. He broke out with Host , the Zoom-call séance movie shot during lockdown on a budget of roughly $100,000, which premiered on Shudder in July 2020 and still sits at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. His follow-up, Dashcam , was much more divisive (46% on RT) and barely registered at the box office. Then came the Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman in 2023, which was originally planned for Hulu, got bumped to theaters after strong test screenings, and grossed about $82.3 million worldwide against a reported $35 million budget, per The Numbers. Other Mommy has now beaten that total on roughly half the money.
Savage did not pretend this was going to be a slow burn. In a pre-release Entertainment Weekly interview, relayed by Dread Central, he guessed the film has around 50 jump scares and then hedged: "It depends on what you refer to as a jump scare." He also argued that a good scare doesn't need the familiar quiet-quiet-BANG setup. Speaking to EW via Gizmodo, he described Chastain's performance as the film's real special effect.
Jessica Chastain, star
Chastain's horror résumé is short but loaded. Guillermo del Toro produced Mama (2013), which opened at No. 1 with $28.4 million and grossed $148.1 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. She later played adult Beverly Marsh in It Chapter Two (2019), which made $473.1 million worldwide. With Other Mommy , she's back to the "mother figure as monster" territory that Mama mined, except this time she plays the monster too. By mid-October it had already passed Lawless to become her ninth-highest domestic grosser, per Koimoi.
In a Rotten Tomatoes interview, she explained that the production kept its young lead out of the room for the scariest material, because "children need to be protected." She also described the Other Mommy smile: as warm as possible, no teeth, and no blinking. Talking to SYFY Wire, she said the real horror is a child's safest place, their parent, turning into the threat.
Photo: Jay Duplass by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
The rest of the team
James Wan produced through Blumhouse Atomic Monster, the company formed when Jason Blum's and Wan's banners merged in January 2024. Nathan Elston, a Succession writer, adapted the screenplay, and Savage and Malerman are among the executive producers alongside Michael Clear, Judson Scott and Ryan Lewis. Malerman is best known for Bird Box , whose 2018 Netflix adaptation became one of the streamer's biggest films; Netflix later said it was watched by 89 million households.
Photo: James Wan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
The Backstory: From Incidents Around the House to Other Mommy
Malerman's novel Incidents Around the House was published by Del Rey on June 25, 2024. He has said the idea came from a story his brother told him about a child saying goodnight to an "Other Mommy." Things moved fast from there:
- April 16, 2025: the adaptation is announced with Savage directing, Chastain starring and Elston writing for Universal, per JoBlo, which relayed Deadline's report.
- July 2025: the project is retitled Other Mommy , and Clark, Duplass and Lachman join the cast.
- September 2025: Universal moves the release from May 8, 2026 to Oct. 9, 2026, putting it right in spooky season ( JoBlo).
- July 2026: the theater-only teaser plays before The Odyssey , then goes online July 21.
- Sept. 15, 2026: the second trailer drops.
- Oct. 9, 2026: theatrical release, with critics' screenings held until the last minute, according to CinemaBlend.
- Nov. 10, 2026: digital release, 32 days after opening.
That's about 18 months from announcement to theaters. By studio standards, that's a sprint, and it's the Blumhouse playbook in a nutshell: a known book, a proven genre director, a star with range, and no time for the project to go stale in development.
By the Numbers
- Opening weekend: about $27.5 million estimated (actuals came in near $27.8 million) from 3,365 theaters, landing at No. 1 when tracking had pointed to around $20 million ( AP).
- Second weekend: about $8.25 million, a drop of roughly 70%.
- Running total: about $108 million worldwide by Nov. 3 ( Koimoi), around $111 million by Nov. 7 per Forbes, and more than $115 million per Decider. Domestic and international are splitting close to 50/50.
- Budget: reported at $18 to $19 million.
- Rank: the fourth-biggest horror opening of 2026, behind Backrooms ($81.4M), Scream 7 ($63.6M) and Resident Evil ($60.1M), per Rotten Tomatoes.
- Reviews: 19% Tomatometer from 100 reviews, a 48% Popcornmeter, and a Metacritic score of 39.
- CinemaScore: D+. RT's box office column notes it's the biggest opening ever for a film with that grade, ahead of Alexander and Hereditary.
The critics weren't gentle. CinemaBlend's roundup gathered pans from Variety, RogerEbert.com, the New York Post, JoBlo and Dread Central, with most of them landing on the same complaint: lots of jump scares, not much movie around them. The defenders, including a few mid-range reviews and a Dread Central "devil's advocate" column, mostly agree on one thing: Chastain is doing something far stranger and braver than the material around her.
Analysis: What Other Mommy Really Means
Strip away the reviews and you're left with a clean business story. A movie that cost less than $20 million made more than five times that in theaters, and it did so in a month crowded with Clayface , Wicker and a Halloween corridor full of genre options. Koimoi pegs its theatrical break-even point at under $50 million worldwide. Whatever you think of the jump-scare count, Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster will make this kind of movie again, probably with the same team.
The more interesting question is why it worked when the word of mouth was this bad. Three things stand out. First, the marketing sold one image better than any horror campaign this year: Chastain's frozen, toothless smile. The theater-only teaser created a "did you see that?" moment before anyone could watch it online. Second, the audience skewed very young. PostTrak data reported by Deadline had 38% of opening-weekend moviegoers aged 18 to 24, the crowd most likely to go opening weekend and least likely to care about a Tomatometer score. Third, the date move to October put it squarely in the season when people buy a ticket to something scary on a Friday night.
The cost of that strategy shows up in the second weekend. A 70% drop is brutal even for horror, which is famously front-loaded. Compare Mama , which opened almost identically at $28.4 million in 2013 and then kept legs long enough to earn $148 million worldwide. Or look at The Boogeyman , which opened much smaller and finished smaller. Other Mommy sits in the middle: a monster opening, then a fast fade. It's the profile of a movie people were curious about rather than one they told friends to see.
That's why today's release matters more than usual. PVOD is where a movie like this can find a second life. At home, a "fun bad" or "better than they said" reputation can travel, and a Chastain performance that critics singled out as the best thing in the film gets watched by people who skipped it in theaters. The 32-day window also says something about Universal's approach: it pulled this out of theaters as soon as the box office cooled and is charging premium prices while the title is still in the conversation. Expect the same playbook for every mid-budget Blumhouse Atomic Monster release in 2027.
For Savage, this is a career inflection point. He now has two studio hits in a row, and his worst-reviewed film is his biggest earner. The worry is that the industry learns the wrong lesson, rewarding volume of scares over the kind of inventive, lean filmmaking that made Host special. The hope is that the next studio gig gives him the time and trust to make something that hits with critics and audiences.
What We Still Don't Know
- The Peacock date. Nothing official yet.
- A sequel. Nobody at Universal has publicly floated one, but the numbers make the conversation inevitable.
- Whether the deleted scenes change anything. "Alternate Car Confrontation" is the one to watch if you're curious how the film might have played differently.
- Savage's next move. No new directing project has been confirmed.
Bottom Line
Other Mommy is the year's clearest example of a movie critics and theater crowds rejected while the box office happily paid for it. Now it's cheap enough to rent on a weeknight, which makes this the fairest test it'll ever get: no hype, no opening-night crowd, just you, the couch and Chastain's unblinking stare. So we want to know: if you saw it in theaters, was the D+ fair? And if you're watching it at home this week, tell us whether it's a hidden gem or a jump-scare machine.
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Header photo: Jessica Chastain via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added. Trailers and featurette: Universal Pictures official YouTube channel.
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