'Other Mommy' Projected to Lead a Soft Weekend as 'The Social Reckoning' Lags

Other Mommy and The Social Reckoning open in North American theaters on Friday, October 9, 2026, and the weekend sets two opposite bets on what draws audiences to the movies. Variety's projections, published October 7, put the Universal horror film at the top of the chart and Aaron Sorkin's Sony drama well behind it. Every dollar figure here is Variety's opening-weekend projection. The weekend does not end until October 11, and no final gross exists yet.

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Variety's Rebecca Rubin framed the pairing as a weekend of "two very different villains: an autocratic tech bro and a double-jointed doppelgänger from hell." That line captures the mismatch. One film is supernatural horror built on a best-selling novel and a producer's track record. The other is a prestige drama about a 2021 media scandal, made by the writer of an Oscar-winning hit and projected to open at a fraction of its predecessor.

What the two films are

Other Mommy is produced by James Wan through his Atomic Monster banner with Blumhouse, and directed by Rob Savage, whose earlier films include Host and The Boogeyman. Nathan Elston wrote the screenplay, adapted from Josh Malerman's New York Times-bestselling novel Incidents Around the House. Malerman also wrote Bird Box. Jessica Chastain stars in a dual role as a mother and the sinister entity that looks and sounds just like her. Jay Duplass, Arabella Olivia Clark, Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen also appear. The film is rated R and runs 1 hour 33 minutes.

The Social Reckoning is written and directed by Sorkin. Sony describes it as a companion piece to 2010's The Social Network rather than a sequel, and the studio has tried to keep the two at a distance. That framing is a positioning choice. The 2010 film is a critical landmark, and calling the new one a sequel would invite a direct comparison it might not win; a companion piece keeps the association while lowering the bar. The film dramatizes the 2021 "Facebook Files" leak, the scandal recounted in the film's Wikipedia entry, in which a Facebook engineer gave thousands of internal documents to a Wall Street Journal reporter. Mikey Madison plays the whistleblower, Jeremy Allen White the reporter and Jeremy Strong Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin and Billy Magnussen are also in the cast. David Fincher, who directed The Social Network, and Jesse Eisenberg, who played Zuckerberg in it, did not return.

The projected numbers

Variety projects Other Mommy to lead with $20 million or more from about 3,200 North American theaters, a solid result for a film made for $18 million. The same report puts The Social Reckoning at just $7 million to $8 million in North America, against a reported production budget of $30 million. On those projections, the horror film opens to roughly two and a half times the drama's domestic take while costing about 60 percent as much to make.

The comparison to The Social Network is one Sony cannot avoid. That film opened to $22 million in 2010, not adjusted for inflation, and grossed $224 million worldwide. It won four Academy Awards, one of them for Sorkin's screenplay. The Social Reckoning is projected to open at roughly a third of that domestic debut.

The budget gap compounds the opening gap. Other Mommy was made for $18 million and The Social Reckoning for a reported $30 million, so a dollar of the horror film's projected opening goes further against its cost than a dollar of the drama's smaller projected take goes against its larger one. On Variety's projections, the horror film could approach break-even on its North American opening before international grosses are counted, while the drama would need a long run and strong overseas returns to cover its budget. Studios do not publish those calculations, and a theatrical result alone rarely settles a film's profitability once streaming and licensing are added.

The first reviews

The first wave of reviews reads more kindly toward Sorkin's film, at least in the trades. Variety's critic Guy Lodge wrote that The Social Reckoning's procedural retelling of the leak "already feels behind the curve," while allowing that it is "diverting enough, clever enough and true enough." Rotten Tomatoes headlined its first-reviews roundup "Mikey Madison Shines and Jeremy Strong Nails the Uncanny Zuckerberg Valley."

Reaction to Other Mommy was rougher. The Hollywood Reporter's Richard Lawson titled his review "Jessica Chastain Commits Admirably to an Otherwise Flimsy Supernatural Chiller," which suggests the star's commitment outruns the material. An earlier first-reactions roundup quoted a critic calling it "Jessica Chastain's worst movie in a long time." These are individual reviews from the opening wave, not an aggregate score, and no settled critic consensus exists at publication.

Early reviews matter more to one of these films than the other. A prestige drama leans on reviews to build the slow, older-skewing run that can stretch past opening weekend. A horror title depends less on critics and more on whether the audience that shows up tells other people it delivered. That difference is why warm reviews for one film and a smaller projected opening for it are not a contradiction. It is also why the first reviews, however harsh or kind, are a weak predictor of which film has the better weekend.

Variety framed the weekend as one of "two very different villains: an autocratic tech bro and a double-jointed doppelgänger from hell."

The weekend around them

The holdovers shape this frame as much as the new releases. Last weekend's No. 1, Verity, the Amazon MGM adaptation of Colleen Hoover's novel starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, is projected to fall 50% to 60% to about $13 million to $16 million, per GoldDerby's weekend box-office analysis. It has earned $34 million domestically and $65 million worldwide against a $40 million budget.

Tom Cruise's Digger, a Warner Bros. release with a budget reported above $160 million, looks to add about $4 million in its second weekend after an $8 million opening. That is a historic bomb by any reading of the numbers. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey returns to Imax and 70mm screens this weekend, giving exhibitors one more familiar title.

The backdrop explains why the frame matters to theater owners. October 2025 was described as a disastrous month at the box office, and adult dramas have struggled to draw crowds since the pandemic. A weekend led by a horror film and a talky prestige drama is the fall's attempt to bring audiences back before the awards-season releases arrive.

The star-and-IP bet, tested twice

Set the specific films aside, and the weekend tests one idea from two directions. Both releases pair a known name with known material, and both are being asked to sell that combination to an audience that has grown choosier. Other Mommy attaches Chastain and Wan to a best-selling book and Wan's track record in horror. The Social Reckoning attaches Sorkin, an Oscar winner for the first film's screenplay, to a scandal that already has a celebrated film in its orbit.

The horror film's path is the more straightforward of the two. A genre audience reliably turns out for a Wan-produced scare, and the novel brought its own readers. The drama's path is harder. Adult dramas about institutions have struggled to fill theaters in this era, and a companion piece carries the risk of comparison without the benefit of novelty. The early projections point to the scare as the easier sale.

That is not a verdict on either film. The Sorkin movie drew the warmer early reviews, and the gap between what critics prefer and what audiences buy is a familiar one. One weekend of projections is thin evidence about a trend, and the actual turnout has not been measured yet.

Caveats

Three qualifications belong with these numbers. First, every figure is a Variety projection from October 7, 2026, and previews, tracking and Sunday estimates can move it in either direction; final studio numbers arrive after October 11. Second, the reviews cited here are a first sample from the opening wave, and no aggregate critic score was published at the time of writing. Third, the production budgets are reported, not confirmed by the studios, and a projected opening says nothing about a film's eventual total or its value on streaming.

There is also a timing problem that no projection can solve. A film's commercial story is written over weeks, not one weekend, and both titles will be judged by how they hold once the first audience has seen them. The horror film's second-weekend drop will show whether curiosity turns into word of mouth. The drama's run will show whether prestige can build slowly, the way it sometimes does when reviews are strong and the release is patient.

What to watch

• The Sunday estimates and Monday actuals. The projections will be replaced by reported numbers within days of publication, and the size of any revision will show how much the tracking missed.
• The second-weekend holds. A horror film that opens on a book's readership and falls sharply tells a different story from one that holds. The same test applies to the drama at a smaller scale.
• The critic-audience split. If The Social Reckoning reviews stay warm while the box office stays soft, it reinforces the pattern that has dogged adult dramas. If audiences rate it far above critics, the picture changes.
• The franchise question. Whether Sony treats the result as a one-off companion piece or as a template for more Facebook-era storytelling depends on how the film is read inside the studio, which will not be visible from the weekend gross alone.

Both films open Friday, and the weekend's verdict arrives with Monday's actuals.

Cover image: Jay Dixit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (portrait predates the film).