‘Social Reckoning’ Goes Dark With $5.5M as ‘Other Mommy’ Delivers at Box Office
I find it deliciously ironic that Sorkin, the master of the walk-and-talk sermon, got out-sold by a movie called Other Mommy. The Social Network was sharp and prescient in 2010, but a decade and a half later, audiences have heard the lecture. They've lived the algorithms. They don't need another scene of a man in a suit explaining why the internet is bad.
What's interesting to me is that Other Mommy leaned into the scathing reviews. Horror has always thrived on being dismissed, and Chastain's pivot to the genre feels like a dare. The critics said it was messy, and people showed up anyway. That tells me audiences want to be unsettled in a primal way, and the Sorkin-style lecture isn't what fills seats.
I'd want to know what the exit polls said, whether the Sorkin crowd just stayed home or actively avoided it. And I wonder if this tells studios that prestige drama with a moral is a tougher sell than a monster that wears a mother's face. Maybe the real social reckoning is that we'd rather be scared than schooled.