Much of the Covid-19 recovery period for the box office has been a mixed bag, and Martin Luther King Jr. weekend was no different as overall grosses improved from last year but remain well below what the January holiday brought prior to the pandemic.

The estimated final overall total for the four-day weekend is 127 million, approximately 49 above the 85 million grossed last year. But it’s also 32 below the 205 million grossed on the holiday weekend in January 2020 less than two months before the pandemic closed theaters.

The year-over-year improvement came from a mix of solid performance from holdover films combined with some modest contributions from new releases. On MLK weekend in 2022, more than half of the weekend’s meager gross came from the 33.8 million opening of Paramount’s “Scream” revival and the 24.6 million grossed by the wildly popular “Spider-Man: No Way Home” in its fifth weekend. With the film industry still...