Mother Mary Is Now Streaming — But Should You Actually Watch It?
TL;DR: Anne Hathaway's psychological thriller Mother Mary flopped hard at the box office, grossing just $2.6 million worldwide against a $20 million budget. It's now available on PVOD platforms in the US and UK, with an HBO Max window coming later. Indian audiences will likely need to wait for a separate OTT deal to be confirmed.
If you're an HBO Max subscriber waiting for Anne Hathaway's latest film to land on your home screen, here's the practical reality: Mother Mary has moved to digital rental and purchase platforms as of May 20, 2026, but the full streaming window on Max hasn't opened yet. For Indian audiences on Netflix, Prime Video, or Hotstar, there's no confirmed deal at all — which means the wait could stretch into late 2026 or beyond, depending on how A24 chooses to handle international distribution for a film that, frankly, didn't give them much box-office leverage to negotiate with.
The cause of that wait? A theatrical run so underwhelming it became one of the more discussed commercial misfires of the spring season.
What Actually Happened at the Box Office
Let's be direct about the numbers, because they're stark.
Mother Mary opened in limited release on April 17, 2026, before expanding to 1,103 North American venues during the April 24 to May 1 window. According to box office tracking, the film earned $2.5 million domestically and just over $121,000 internationally, for a worldwide total of approximately $2.6 million. The production budget was $20 million, before marketing costs.
That's not a slow burn. That's a collapse.
At the time of writing, the film was still playing in 21 domestic theaters — a number that tells its own story. A24 is known for platform releases that build gradually on word of mouth (Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hereditary, Midsommar). The model didn't hold here. Worth noting: Everything Everywhere opened on 10 screens and expanded to over 2,200 across its run, eventually grossing $141 million worldwide. Mother Mary expanded to 1,103 screens and then cratered, losing roughly 80% of its theaters within two weeks. The platform-release playbook only works when the word of mouth is actually good enough to sustain expansion, and the 59% audience score tells you everything about why the engine stalled.
Key facts at a glance:
- Director: David Lowery
- Lead: Anne Hathaway as "Mother Mary," a pop icon staging a comeback
- Supporting cast: Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, FKA Twigs, Kaia Gerber, Sian Clifford, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista
- Production budget: $20 million
- Worldwide gross: $2.6 million
- Current availability: PVOD (rent/buy) in the US and UK
- Future platform: HBO Max (date unconfirmed)
- Runtime: Approximately 110 minutes (not officially confirmed)
The Hathaway Paradox: The Devil Wears Prada 2 vs. Mother Mary
Here's what nobody mentions in most write-ups about Mother Mary: the sheer strangeness of Hathaway's spring 2026 in contrast.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 earned $547 million in worldwide ticket sales — a blockbuster by any measure, and a reminder that Hathaway's commercial instincts, when she's working with mainstream material, remain sharp. But Mother Mary wasn't made to compete with sequels to beloved comedies. It was made for a different audience, with a different set of intentions.
The more interesting question isn't why it failed commercially. It's whether Hathaway's choice to make it back-to-back with a guaranteed crowd-pleaser represents a deliberate career strategy or something more personal.
I keep coming back to that interview quote about "going somewhere I'd been avoiding." That doesn't sound like a calculated awards play. It sounds like an actress using a small, strange film to do something she needed to do.
What Critics Actually Said — and Why the Gap Matters
On Rotten Tomatoes, Mother Mary holds a 70% "fresh" critics score based on 178 reviews, against a 59% "rotten" audience score from verified users. That gap — critics moderately on board, general audiences visibly not — is the most revealing data point the film has produced.
What strikes me is how consistently critics praised Hathaway's performance while expressing reservations about whether the film's formal ambitions actually cohere. Reviewers acknowledged that Hathaway "acquits herself well," and several compared Lowery's approach here to the glacial, image-driven pacing of A Ghost Story (2017), a film that divided audiences in almost identical ways.
Most coverage frames Mother Mary's failure as a marketing problem or a scheduling misfire, but the more honest read is that Lowery made a film whose internal logic is closer to experimental video art than psychological thriller. The trailer sold a Black Swan-adjacent descent-into-madness narrative; what audiences got (particularly in the extended, nearly dialogue-free second act) was something far more abstract and withholding. That's not a marketing failure. That's a film that doesn't want to be the thing it was sold as, and audiences rightly felt betrayed by the bait-and-switch.
Lowery himself has spoken about the project's thematic ambitions. In press materials circulated ahead of the film's release, he described Mother Mary as a film about "the cost of spectacle and the violence we do to ourselves in the name of performance." That's a rich premise. Whether the execution delivers on it is where viewers seem to genuinely disagree.
Hathaway, for her part, told interviewers during the film's promotional run that the role required her to "go somewhere I'd been avoiding for a long time" — a characteristically guarded but intriguing statement from an actress who tends to be precise about what she reveals publicly.
How This Lands for Indian Streaming Audiences (And Why It Matters)
Honestly, this is where the picture gets murky. And Indian audiences deserve a straight answer.
As of this writing, there is no confirmed Indian OTT deal for Mother Mary. A24 titles have historically landed on a variety of platforms in India — Midsommar arrived on Amazon Prime Video India, while Hereditary eventually found its way to multiple platforms through licensing deals. The pattern isn't consistent enough to predict where Mother Mary will go.
Movie OTT is currently tracking the film's international availability, and the Indian streaming window remains listed as unconfirmed. Given the film's weak box office, studios sometimes accelerate international OTT deals to recoup losses — so there's a reasonable chance an announcement comes before the end of Q3 2026.
What Indian viewers can expect, based on A24's recent behavior in the market:
- Netflix India has been the landing spot for some A24 prestige titles
- Amazon Prime Video India has picked up others, particularly in the thriller space
- Disney+ Hotstar is less likely, given A24's existing relationships elsewhere
- SonyLIV or Zee5 are possible but historically less common for A24 content
- No Hindi or regional language dub has been confirmed — and given the film's limited commercial profile, one may not come at all
Indian audiences who want to watch now can access PVOD options through platforms like Apple TV or Google Play if they have access to international storefronts, though pricing and regional availability vary. Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker is the cleanest way to check current regional status as deals get confirmed.
David Lowery's Track Record: Why This Film Exists
David Lowery is one of American cinema's more genuinely interesting directors, which makes Mother Mary's commercial failure easy to contextualize — if not entirely easy to excuse as a business decision.
His filmography reads like a deliberate refusal of the mainstream:
- Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013) — a lyrical, sun-bleached crime drama that critics loved and almost no one saw
- Pete's Dragon (2016) — his unexpected Disney detour, and his most commercially successful film
- A Ghost Story (2017) — a meditation on grief and time that became an arthouse touchstone
- The Old Man & the Gun (2018) — Robert Redford's rumored final performance, gentle and elegiac
- The Green Knight (2021) — A24's Arthurian epic, divisive but visually magnificent
Mother Mary fits squarely in the Lowery mode: style-forward, emotionally oblique, more interested in atmosphere than plot mechanics. The supernatural elements reportedly function less as horror devices and more as psychological projections — closer to Black Swan (2010) than to anything in A24's horror catalogue.
Michaela Coel's casting as Sam Anselm, the estranged costume designer at the center of the film's central relationship, is one of the more inspired choices in the project. Coel's work on I May Destroy You demonstrated an ability to carry morally ambiguous, emotionally demanding material. How that energy interacts with Hathaway's more controlled star persona is apparently one of the film's genuine pleasures, according to critics who responded warmly.
Should You Actually Watch It?
If you responded to A Ghost Story or Black Swan, yes — with adjusted expectations. If you're looking for a thriller with conventional payoffs, this probably isn't your film. Not every swing connects. But the swings worth watching are rarely the safe ones.
The PVOD window is live now. The HBO Max release is the next confirmed milestone, though no specific date has been announced. For international markets, including India, the timeline remains open.
What to watch for over the next 60 days: any A24 announcement regarding Indian or broader Asian streaming rights, and whether the film surfaces on Netflix's global acquisition radar. Lowery's The Green Knight found a second life on streaming that its theatrical run didn't predict — Mother Mary could follow a similar path, particularly if Hathaway's overall 2026 profile drives curious viewers back to her smaller work.
For streaming availability updates across all regions as deals are confirmed, Movie OTT is tracking the film in real time.
