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‘Other Mommy’ Reviews: “Jessica Chastain’s Worst in a Long Time”

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First reactions finally in for Other Mommy, and some are pretty scary for Universal.

The horror movie isn’t having official U.S. critics screenings until the last minute, with previews held tonight in New York and Los Angeles before the film opens Friday. But some international influencers, awards bloggers, and a few credentialed Rotten Tomatoes critics have seen the film, and are offering their hot takes.

Despite a killer teaser trailer that had audiences jumping in their seats, the Blumhouse/Atomic Monster production is getting roasted by some members of a crowd that typically skews positive. The film stars Jessica Chastain in a dual role as a mother whose daughter (Arabella Olivia Clark) is being haunted by a demonic entity. The film is based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House and directed by Rob Savage (Host). The director had rather surprisingly bragged that the film features around 50 jump scares, which works out to around one every two minutes.

Regardless, Other Mommy is expected to lead the weekend’s box office, opening to an estimated $20 million.

Here are some of the early reactions to the film, which does have a few enthusiastic fans in the mix as well.

The Jam Report: “By the time Other Mommy staggered towards its ludicrous finale, the audience at my screening had abandoned any pretense of fear and erupted into laughter … An excruciating parade of ineffective jump scares, woeful CGI, and increasingly nonsensical storytelling, Other Mommy is comfortably among the most disappointing horror films of the year. It had transformed a promising supernatural premise into an unintentionally hilarious endurance test, all while remaining blissfully unaware of its own absurdity.”

The Matinee Show: “Solid creepy premise, but it definitely starts to lose its grip. Some genuinely unsettling moments, mixed with a few ‘okay… what the hell are we doing?’ moments. Not bad, just messier than scary 3/5.”

Global Box Office: “Other Mommy is a hot mess and Jessica Chastain’s worst movie in a long time. The direction is sloppy, the score is unremarkable, and not even Chastain can save such a terrible screenplay … What should be a straightforward premise is bogged down by cheap melodrama and repetitive, failed jump scares.”

Goldwin Reviews: “Other Mommy is like a buffet of all the other horror movies rolled into one. It can get overwhelming, but that excess becomes part of a meaningful experience. Eventually, it becomes a feast for the soul that yearns for horror with substance. The film isn’t content with settling into just one form. It has many layers, constantly reinventing itself. 4/5.”

The AU Review: “Savage demonstrates an obvious enthusiasm for constructing elaborate sequences that play with perspective, physical space and the vulnerability of a child’s imagination. But while the technical ambition is evident, the storytelling rarely matches it … even Chastain’s considerable talents can only do so much with material that doesn’t offer her character enough depth beyond her unsettling appearance. What begins with the promise of something genuinely nightmarish gradually deteriorates into a disappointingly conventional, occasionally laughable supernatural exercise.”

Sean Kelly on Movies: “#OtherMommy is a film that I initially feared peaked during its pre credit sequence, i.e. the scene from the first trailer, but director Rob Savage delivers a demonic supernatural horror film that’s a mashup of everything from The Grudge to IT to Insidious … While the film is the definition of critic-proof, given how it’s tracking to top the box office, I’m still puzzled why Universal opted not to screen the film for critics and I had to luck out on a +1 to an advanced screening.”

Screen Space: “Ponderously paced, over-directed with gimmicky flourishes and confusing in its half-baked message, Other Mommy wants to be ‘elevated horror’ but stumbles trying to climb above the better films it’s seeking to be … There’s an extended sequence that rips off Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and some realm displacement nonsense that doesn’t make sense, on the way to an embarrassingly overwrought ending.”

Additional critic reviews for Other Mommy will begin to roll in this evening, with the movie opening in theaters tomorrow.

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Casey Giltner Spec ‘This Land Is Our Land’ Sells To Sony Pictures

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EXCLUSIVE: Screenwriter Casey Giltner has sold elevated thriller spec This Land Is Our Land to Sony Pictures, Deadline has learned.

Plot details are being kept under wraps. Andrew Form, of the A Quiet Place franchise, will produce alongside Lawdie Pahlavan.

Giltner is a screenwriter and novelist whose holiday horror spec On The First Day of Christmas made the 2021 Blood List. He’s also co-writer on Speak, a ventriloquist dummy horror thriller starring Josh Duhamel that we scooped last month. Coming off the August release of his debut novel, a horror-thriller titled Home School, he is repped by Independent Artist Group, Zero Gravity Management and Yorn, Levine, Barnes.

Recent months have brought a veritable flood of Sony news. Circling a Battlefield adaptation teaming Michael B. Jordan and Christopher McQuarrie, the studio has also recently added cast to films including Fake Skating, Narcs, Hollow and the Tom Holland-led Fred Astaire biopic; dated titles like Treasure Island and 24 Jump Street; and acquired Michelle Yeoh’s Thunder Road action thriller The Surgeon, with Sony Pictures Worldwide snapping up all international rights to the indie horror breakout Buddy. Screen Gems has set Michael Lewen to direct its high-concept comedy White Knight, with Maia Eyre joining Columbia as EVP Creative Development.

Recently, in our Dish column, we reported that Sony is prepping a Spider-Man: Brand New Day re-release featuring extra footage following the success of Disney’s re-release for Avengers: Endgame.

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Scott Bakula To Headline Detective Drama In Works At CBS (Exclusive)

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EXCLUSIVE: NCIS: New Orleans star Scott Bakula is eying a return to CBS with another procedural drama, which is in development at the network. Bakula is set to star in and executive produce the untitled project,.which comes from Dean Devlin’s Electric Entertainment.

The drama, a high-concept detective procedural set in Los Angeles, is written and executive produced by Perception co-creator Michael Sussman, who was a writer-producer of one of Bakula’s signature series, Star Trek: Enterprise.

And in a nod to another classic Bakula show, his character is described as quite a “leap” from the one he played on NCIS: New Orleans.

In addition to Bakula’s seven-season run as the lead of NCIS: New Orleans and his starring roles on NBC’s Quantum Leap and UPN’s Star Trek: Enterprise, he played one of the leads of TNT comedy-drama Men of a Certain Age. He has earned five Emmy nominations to date, four for Quantum Leap and one for the HBO movie Behind the Candelabra. Bakula, who will next be seen in Netflix’s hockey drama The Sticks, is repped by CAA, Anonymous Content and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller.

Devlin’s Electric Entertainment made its mark as an independent studio with its own financing and distribution that carved out a niche for itself as a supplier of efficiently produced high-end scripted programming to basic cable networks with such franchises as The Librarian and Leverage. This would mark the company’s first broadcast show.

Sussman, whose series credits also include The Last Ship and 12 Monkeys, is repped by Echo Lake Entertainment and Myman Greenspan Fox.

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Inside Out 2 Director Kelsey Mann Signs with UTA

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Pixar veteran Kelsey Mann, who most recently directed Pixar’s Inside Out 2, has signed with UTA for representation in all areas.

It is the latest animation get for the agency, which in the summer signed longtime Dreamworks and Forgotten Island co-director Januel Mercado.

And it continues a trend of animators stepping out of their animation companies to test of the waters of a wider entertainment industry, sometimes beyond straight animation. In September, for example, Minions creator and Despicable Me filmmaker Pierre Coffin signed with WME.

Mann’s last movie was Inside Out 2, one of the biggest critical and commercial successes of 2024. It earned a 98 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and grossed $1.7 billion worldwide, earning him an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature while setting the record for the highest-grossing directorial debut in film history.

A storyboard artist who earned his stripes on Cartoon Network, Warner Bros., and Lucasfilm Animation shows, Mann joined in Pixar in 2009, serving as story supervisor on Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, which he also co-wrote, and Onward. He also contributed to Pixar’s senior creative team across recent hits including Toy Story 5, Hoppers, Elemental, and Turning Red. He made his directorial debut with the Monsters University theatrical short Party Central.

Mann is now focusing on his next chapter as an independent director and creator.

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