Paramount Pictures Stands Up for mother!

The movie mother! hit theaters last weekend riding some major star power (Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer) and a delightfully great trailer (it came up twice on this podcast where we shared our favorite fall 2017 movie trailers). Then the movie landed with a thud, scoring only $7.5 million at the U.S. box office in its opening weekend.

But the story doesn’t end there as a strange brand of buzz is now swirling around the film. Much of that is the result of the fact that, while the movie currently has a decent 68% fresh rate on Rotten Tomatoes, it received an F CinemaScore from opening day audiences. For context, only 13 movies have ever received an F rating in CinemaScore history (you can view the full list here).

Now that score doesn’t necessarily mean the movie was bad per se, just that the film itself didn’t match up with audience expectations. As Collider notes, the CinemaScore is essentially “a metric that basically measures how well a film’s marketing matched up to the movie people went out to see on opening weekend.” In the case of mother! it may have been an instance where filmgoers felt they were sold a completely different movie than the one they saw.

In a somewhat unconventional move, Megan Colligan, the President of Worldwide Distribution and Marketing for Paramount Pictures (the studio behind mother!) publicly came to the movie’s defense, saying:

“This movie is very audacious and brave. You are talking about a director at the top of his game, and an actress at the top of her game. They made a movie that was intended to be bold. Everyone wants original filmmaking, and everyone celebrates Netflix when they tell a story no one else wants to tell. This is our version. We don’t want all movies to be safe. And it’s okay if some people don’t like it.”

The question now becomes: Will all the chatter about mother! help or hurt its chances of connecting with audiences moving forward?