Today, Moderna joined the list of companies seeing positive results from COVID-19 vaccine trials, meaning we might someday really bring an end to this pandemic through the brute force of pharmaceutical companies alone—and with no help from the federal government whatsoever! That means the American movie theater industry just has to desperately hang on for a little bit longer and hope that the vaccine is widely distributed extremely quickly and hope that everyone decides to celebrate their vaccine with a trip to the movie theater (and a very big soda, possibly with an outdated Tenet or Black Widow ad on the cup), and then everything will work out just fine. It’s all going to be okay!
But things are not especially okay just yet. This past weekend went just about the same as most of the past weekends have at the U.S. box office, with one movie coming out and making relatively good money while every other movie dropped way down. The new movie this time was The Croods: A New Age, which made $9.7 million. It beat the last new movie to come out, the three-week-old Freaky, which dropped to second with $770,000. Then we have The War With Grandpa, which has been on the charts for eight weeks now and only has $17 million to show for it (it made $643,000 this weekend).
The rest of the top 10 is half old movies being rereleased by movie studios that need some extra cash to pay the bills and half new movies that will mostly be remembered for the fact that they came out during the pandemic. In fourth place we have grown-up Western Let Him Go ($459,000), followed by Gillian Jacobs horror movie Come Play ($389,000), and then Liam Neeson’s Honest Thief ($350,000). Tenet came in eighth place with $300,000, with Elf, The Santa Clause, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation in there as well with similarly small totals.
For a more detailed breakdown of this weekend’s box office totals, head over to Box Office Mojo.