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Released
1994 · FILM

Serial Mom

A picture‑perfect suburban mom fights to keep her family intact while her obsessive urge to punish petty offenses turns her into a cold‑blooded serial killer, forcing her to juggle domestic bliss against a deadly double life.

“Every mom wants to be wanted, but not for murder!”

Directed by
John Waters
Written by
John Waters
Rated
MPA · R
Runtime
94 min
ComedyCrimeThriller
Streaming on
  • Paramount+

Synopsis

Beverly appears to be the ideal happy homemaker, living with her attentive husband and two children. However, this seemingly perfect nuclear family may be on the verge of collapse as Beverly's growing fascination with serial killers begins to conflict with her otherwise strict sense of propriety and ethics.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 22

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Janice HamptonShot by Robert M StevensScored by Basil PoledourisDesigned by Sarah Smallman

Box Office

1994 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.6× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$7.8M

Budget$13.0M
Worldwide gross$7.8M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $2.0M — 26% of its US run.

Peak 502 theaters

Also known as

  • Serial Mom - Warum lässt Mama das Morden nicht?de
  • Serial Motherfr
  • La signora ammazzatuttiit

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