Andy Muschietti’s breakthrough was the 2013 film Mama.
Mama was Muschietti’s feature directorial debut, a supernatural horror film co-written with Neil Cross and his sister Barbara Muschietti. It stars Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as adults caring for two young girls who have spent years in isolation after a traumatic disappearance.
The film grew from Muschietti’s 2008 Argentine short film Mamá. Guillermo del Toro saw the short, praised its frightening imagery, and came aboard as an executive producer for the feature adaptation. That connection helped bring the project to a wider studio audience and established Muschietti as a director to watch in genre cinema.
Mama was released by Universal Pictures in January 2013. Made for about $15 million, it earned more than $146 million worldwide. Muschietti later gained much larger recognition by directing It (2017), It Chapter Two (2019), and The Flash (2023), but Mama remains the film that launched his feature-film career.