While I personally was a fan of mother!, casual film fans left screenings of mother! angry and disappointed as most casual movie goers did not expect the craziness of the film. With that being said, the film received a dubious score of F on Cinemascore. mother! is just one of 19 films to earn an “F” grade from CinemaScore, alongside other box office underperformers The Wicker Man, The Box and Killing Them Softly. Aronofksy’s mother! opened below expectations, grossing just $7.5 million at the domestic box office.
Director Darren Aronofsky has opened up about the grade,
“What’s interesting about that is, like, how if you walk out of this movie are you not going to give it an ‘F?’ It’s a punch. It’s a total punch,” Aronofsky said in a Q&A with The Frame’s John Horn following a screening of the film at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“I realize that we were excited by that,” Aronofsky continued. “We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you. And the reason I wanted to come is because I was very sad and I had a lot of anguish and I wanted to express it. Filmmaking is such a hard journey. People are constantly saying no to you. And to wake up every morning and get out of bed and to face all those ‘no’s, you have to be willing to really believe in something.”
“We’re basically holding up a mirror to what’s going on,” the director explained. “All of us are doing this. But that final chapter hasn’t been written and hopefully things can change. And, to go back, the fact that it’s going down right now and things are really falling apart in a way that is really scary.”
This film may eventually become a cult classic as time progresses and quite frankly is one of the most insightful, thought provoking films in quite a while.
