Other Mommy Scared Up $27.5 Million. Sorkin's Facebook Sequel Did Not
Blumhouse's Jessica Chastain horror opened at No. 1 with a 19% Rotten Tomatoes score and a D+ CinemaScore. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning managed $5.5 million. Digger is still sinking.
Horror does not need critics. It still usually needs the audience to like it a little. Other Mommy tested that.
Universal and Blumhouse opened the Jessica Chastain film at $27.5 million in North America, enough for first place, plus $17.7 million overseas, about $45 million worldwide. The budget is a modest $18 million, so the weekend already covers the check. The reviews do not. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 19%. CinemaScore exit polls handed it a D+. Even Tom Cruise’s Digger, which is turning into a historic miss, managed a C+. Analyst David Gross said horror is usually immune to a bad reception, and that this one is extreme. He expects the second weekend to fall off a cliff.
The movie is a camp thriller about a thing that wears a little girl’s mother, double-jointed and wrong. People bought tickets anyway. That is the Blumhouse trick in one line.
The Social Reckoning did not get the same courtesy. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed the companion piece to The Social Network, Sony’s word, not a sequel, because David Fincher and Jesse Eisenberg stayed home. Mikey Madison plays a Facebook engineer who leaks internal documents to a reporter played by Jeremy Allen White. It opened at $5.5 million domestically, fifth place, and $3.5 million from 29 overseas markets, $9 million worldwide. Sixteen years ago The Social Network opened to $22 million and ended around $224 million, with an Oscar for Sorkin’s script. This one cost $30 million, got a 54% from critics and a B- from audiences, and played mostly to older men.
Digger, meanwhile, dropped 60% to $3.2 million in weekend two. Domestic total about $14 million, worldwide $35 million, against a production cost north of $160 million. Anne Hathaway, Jane Fonda, Guillermo del Toro and Mandy Patinkin have been telling people to go. The second weekend says they did not.
Verity held second at $11.4 million and is a win at $113 million worldwide. Resident Evil was third at $8.3 million, already $300 million global before China had its say. The Facebook movie is the one Sony can afford to shrug at. The Cruise movie is the one the town will be explaining for a year.