Raphael Stevens

In this articleDISVIACThis Memorial Day weekend could have the right combination of new movie releases, number of cinemas open and increased consumer confidence to break the $100 million mark at the box office.Since the pandemic began, theaters have struggled to lure back moviegoers, even with enticing titles such as “Godzilla vs. Kong,” “Mortal Kombat” and “Wonder Woman 1984.”The weekend of April 23 has the highest-grossing weekend box-office tally since the pandemic locked down theaters last spring. Ticket sales reached $57 million, with only around 60% of movie theaters open, according to data from Comscore. The weekend’s top earners were “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” and “Mortal Kombat.”Heading into this Memorial Day weekend, more than 70% of theaters are open and Hollywood has two blockbuster releases: “Cruella” and “A Quiet Place Part II.”The last time the box office topped $100 million over the weekend was March 6, 2020. In non-pandemic times, Memorial Day weekend has averaged around $200 million in ticket sales.Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsMemorial Day weekend in 2020 shrank to just $842,000 in ticket sales, driven almost entirely by drive-in movie theaters.”What a difference a year makes as we now look toward what will be a pivotal Memorial weekend for movie theaters and, thankfully, the start of a true summer movie season, something the industry hasn’t seen in two years,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.While “Cruella” will have a dual release in theaters and on Disney+ Premiere Access, “A Quiet Place Part II” will be available only in theaters. The sequel has been widely praised by critics and been earmarked as a must-see film, especially in theaters. In reviews, critics touted how seeing the film in a theater heightened the experience because sounds — whether on the screen or in the seats nearby — made the thriller more suspenseful.With more theaters open and the pent-up demand, Dergarabedian foresees a chance that Paramount’s “A Quiet Place Part II” could usurp “Godzilla vs. Kong” for the highest opening weekend debut since the health crisis started. “Godzilla vs. Kong” opened with a $32 million haul during the first weekend in April. At that time only 55% of theaters were open in North America.The fate of Disney’s “Cruella” is a little less certain because it will be available in theaters and through Disney+ for $30 on the same day. Some consumers may venture out to the cinema to see the film, but others may choose to stay on the couch and stream. Plus, the film is getting mixed reviews.”The performance of the two new films will serve as a bellwether of consumer confidence and enthusiasm for the movie theater experience,” said Dergarabedian. “[They will] also help to bolster the perception of the movie theater experience as more viable and essential than ever before and not as some had erroneously predicted a pre-ordained casualty of the pandemic.”  If Thursday’s previews are any indicator, both films could be heading toward strong openings. “A Quiet Place Part II” garnered $4.8 million in ticket sales, while “Cruella” nabbed $1.4 million. With Memorial Day weekend’s weather shaping up to be cloudy and dismal for most of the country, movie theaters could see a surge in attendance from folks looking to get out of the house. More

Roughly half of all Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data published Thursday, as nationwide infection levels continued their downward trend.New Covid cases are 23,033 per day, on a seven-day average, down 21% from a week prior, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.U.S. share of the population vaccinatedCDC data shows 49.9% of the U.S. population has received one shot or more, with 40% having completed a full vaccination program.Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsAmong those aged 18 and older, 62% are at least partially vaccinated.Data in a Kaiser Family Foundation survey published Friday suggests that adult vaccination rates could reach 70% in the next few months. President Joe Biden is aiming to hit that target by July 4.In addition to 62% of survey respondents reporting they have received one dose or more, 4% said they want the vaccine as soon as possible. Another 4% of adults — who said they want to “wait and see” before getting a shot — reported that they have already scheduled an appointment or plan to get the vaccine in the next three months.The share of respondents saying they will “definitely not” get vaccinated or only do so if required has remained steady at around 20% in the past few monthly Kaiser Foundation surveys.U.S. vaccine shots administeredAbout 1.6 million vaccine shots have been reported administered each day on average over the past week, CDC data shows.Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsA handful of states have reported that vaccine incentive programs have increased local vaccination numbers in some demographics after recent drops.U.S. Covid casesThe seven-day average of daily U.S. Covid cases was 23,033 as of Thursday, down more than 6,000 from a week ago, according to Johns Hopkins data.Case counts have not been this low since June 2020.Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsAverage daily case counts have fallen by 5% or more in 43 states and the District of Columbia over the past week, a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data shows.In some countries outside of the U.S., infection levels are rising. Bahrain, for example, has seen a record-setting spike in cases since the beginning of May despite having 55% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose, according to data from Our World in Data.U.S. Covid deathsThe latest seven-day average of daily U.S. Covid deaths is 667, JHU data shows, though the release of backlogged data from multiple states in recent days obscures the latest trend.Wednesday’s figures included 373 deaths reported for Oklahoma, which the state announced is part of an “ongoing effort to investigate and reconcile backlog of COVID-19 related deaths.”Maryland on Thursday added about 500 previously unreported deaths to its totals.In some situations, state health departments will attribute a batch of previously unreported cases or deaths to a single day, even if those may have occurred previously. The data may be updated to reflect different dates in the future.Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsBefore the reporting issues this week, the daily death toll had been on the decline for weeks.CNBC Health & Science Read CNBC’s latest coverage of the Covid pandemic:Nearly half of Americans have at least one vaccine shot as Covid case counts fall further EU regulator endorses Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for adolescentsDr. Scott Gottlieb: Covid risk should be low in the U.S. this summer, but will rise in the fallUK approves Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid vaccine for use Cases of Indian Covid-19 variant in England double in one week Australia’s Victoria state to enter Covid-19 lockdown after ‘highly-infectious’ outbreak More

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eased its public health guidance for summer camps Friday, saying fully vaccinated teens don’t need to wear face masks or stay 6 feet away from others.Fully vaccinated teens should still wear masks where required, including at local businesses and workplaces, according to the CDC. Camps can be supportive of staff or campers who choose to continue to wear a mask even if vaccinated, the agency added.While unvaccinated teens should continue to wear masks, the CDC said they generally do not need to wear masks when outdoors unless they are in an area with “substantial to high transmission,” in a crowded setting or attending activities that involve sustained close contact with others.The new guidance from the CDC comes ahead of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the start of summer vacations and camping season for many Americans.On Wednesday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told House lawmakers that the agency was revising its public health guidance for summer camps to account for vaccinated teens. Walensky cleared the expanded use of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine in 12- to 15-year-olds two weeks ago.As of Thursday, more than 165 million Americans ages 12 and older have had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, according to data compiled by the CDC. More than 132 million Americans age 12 and up are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.The previous guidance from the CDC recommended that all kids, regardless of vaccinations, wear masks, with some exceptions for certain activities such as eating, drinking or swimming. It had been criticized by some public health experts and parents who say the risk of spreading Covid is low in outdoor settings and kids have a lower risk of severe illness.”My whole goal is to make sure camps can remain open and that outbreaks don’t occur,” Walensky said during the hearing. She added that her own children did not go to camps last summer. “I want camps to be open this summer.”The guidance also comes two weeks after the CDC said fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear a face mask or stay 6 feet away from others in most settings, whether outdoors or indoors. Unvaccinated people should continue to wear masks, the agency said, as they remain at risk of mild or severe illness, death and risk of spreading the disease to others. More

In this articleAMCStreet performers in Minnie Mouse costumes pass in front of an AMC movie theater at night in the Times Square neighborhood of New York, Oct. 15, 2020.Amir Hamja | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesInvestors shorting the meme stock AMC Entertainment are estimated to have lost $1.23 billion over the last week as the shares rallied more than 116% since Monday, according to data from S3 Partners.The rally cooled off late Friday after AMC’s stock skyrocketed as much as 38% during early morning trading. The shares closed at $26.12 per share Friday, up from $13.68 on Monday. At its peak, the stock reached $36.72 a share.AMC was the most active stock on the New York Stock Exchange by far on Friday as more than 650 million shares changed hands. Its 30-day trading volume average is just above 100 million shares, according to FactSet.With 450 million shares outstanding, the entire company changed hands nearly 1.5 times during Friday’s trading.The so-called short covering could be contributing to AMC’s massive rally this week. The company has about 20% of its outstanding shares sold short, compared with an average of 5% short interest in a typical U.S. stock, S3 Partners said.When a heavily shorted stock jumps higher in a rapid fashion, short sellers are forced to buy back borrowed shares to close out their short position and cut losses. The forced buying tends to fuel the rally even further.AMC’s new retail investors, who stand at 3.2 million strong, owned about 80% of the company’s 450 million outstanding shares as of March 11, AMC reported earlier this month. Their efforts, which surged in January, pushed the stock to $20 a share, up from $5, and allowed AMC to lighten its debt load by around $600 million.The retail investors’ agenda has been to keep AMC alive and to “stick it” to the hedge funds, one analyst told CNBC.The more than 1,100% jump in AMC’s stock since January has defied Wall Street analyst predictions. AMC’s business has been under extreme duress. It has around $5 billion in debt and needed to defer $450 million in lease repayments as its revenue largely dried up during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Theaters were closed for several months to help stop the spread of the virus, and when the company reopened its doors, few consumers felt comfortable attending screenings, and movie studios held back new releases.While the movie theater business is rebounding, AMC is still facing strong headwinds. Though the company ended the first quarter with $1 billion in liquidity, the most it’s ever had in its 100-year history, that cash will only keep it afloat through 2022 unless audiences return in droves to make up for months of no revenue.While initial box-office receipts are promising, fundamental elements of the movie theater business have changed in the last year, including theater capacity, shared release dates with streaming services and the number of days that movies play in theaters.”All that really matters here long term, this company is never going to make cash again,” Rich Greenfield, co-founder of LightShed Partners, said Friday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “They will never generate cash with their current capital structure. It traded at seven times EBITDA pre-pandemic. It’s now trading at 25 times EBITDA right now and it’s in a worse position today with the changed industry. This just defies all logic.”On the last day of 2019, AMC had a market value of $751.87 million. On Friday, that value stood at around $11.9 billion, according to data from FactSet.— CNBC’s Yun Li contributed to this report. More

The coronavirus threat in the U.S. is likely to be rather low this summer, but it’s not guaranteed to stay that way later this year, Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Friday.”I don’t think we should declare mission accomplished. I think that we should declare a near-term victory,” the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner said on “Squawk Box.”Coronavirus cases in the country have tumbled as more Americans get vaccinated against Covid. The seven-day average of daily new infections is around 23,000, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. That’s down more than 50% since the beginning of May alone.”I think we’ve done enough to give ourselves an opportunity to enjoy the summer and be at low risk this summer,” said Gottlieb, who led the FDA from 2017 to 2019 and now serves on the board of vaccine maker Pfizer. However, he added, “I do think that this is going to be a risk as we get into the fall and probably more likely the winter.”CNBC Health & Science Read CNBC’s latest coverage of the Covid pandemic:Nearly half of Americans have at least one vaccine shot as Covid case counts fall further EU regulator endorses Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for adolescentsDr. Scott Gottlieb: Covid risk should be low in the U.S. this summer, but will rise in the fallUK approves Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid vaccine for use Cases of Indian Covid-19 variant in England double in one week Australia’s Victoria state to enter Covid-19 lockdown after ‘highly-infectious’ outbreakOne reason for the cautious outlook for the colder months is because “we could see new variants,” said Gottlieb, who has previously noted that respiratory pathogens like the coronavirus generally spread more easily in the winter. “I think we need to get in place better surveillance, better sequencing of strains so that we can spot these variants more quickly,” he said.The U.S. also cannot ease up on its efforts to get more people vaccinated yet, Gottlieb said. That’s a critical factor in lowering risk across the country.Roughly 50% of the nation’s population has received at least one dose as of Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gottlieb suggested around 75% of the country could be vaccinated by the fall.”So, there’s still work to do. Right now, we’re on a pretty good track doing the right things,” he said.Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and is a member of the boards of Pfizer, genetic testing start-up Tempus, health-care tech company Aetion and biotech company Illumina. He also serves as co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings’ and Royal Caribbean’s “Healthy Sail Panel.” More

Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergencies program Mike Ryan speaks at a news conference on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Geneva, Switzerland.Denis Balibouse | ReutersA top World Health Organization official said Friday that investigations into the origins of Covid-19 are being “poisoned by politics.”U.S. President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he’s ordered intelligence agencies to conduct “a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of Covid-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”The WHO has come under increasing pressure in recent days from U.S. and European officials to take another look at whether the coronavirus could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, after a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report came to light, revealing that three researchers sought hospital care after falling ill with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, asked if countries could separate the politics from the science.”Putting WHO in a position like it has been put in is very unfair to the science we’re trying to carry out, and it puts us as an organization, frankly, in an impossible position to deliver the answers that the world wants,” Ryan said at a news briefing.The WHO has been repeatedly accused of allowing the Chinese government to avoid a thorough investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which was first discovered in Wuhan in late 2019. At a Senate hearing earlier this week Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., pressed White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on the WHO’s close ties to China.”Can we agree that if you took (Chinese) President Xi Jinping and turned him upside down and shook him, the World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?” Fauci responded by saying that he has no way of knowing China’s influence on the agency.The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan virology lab was initially dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory, but it’s been gaining traction in recent weeks.The majority of the intelligence community believes that it is equally plausible that the virus originated in a lab and in an animal. Federal health officials continue to maintain their position that it is more likely that the virus has zoonotic origins. The CDC’s website still states “we know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat.” More

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris receive an update on the fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic as they visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., March 19, 2021.Carlos Barria | ReutersPresident Joe Biden’s first budget proposal would give the largest funding boost in nearly two decades to the agency most closely tracking the coronavirus pandemic, his administration said Friday.The budget blueprint for fiscal 2022 would include $8.7 billion in discretionary funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to budget documents shared by the Office of Management and Budget.The agency said that budget bump would build on the CDC investments doled out in the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan that Biden signed into law in March.CNBC PoliticsRead more of CNBC’s politics coverage:Biden budget includes his big-ticket spending plans, would boost health, education fundingSenate Republicans block bill to create commission to probe pro-Trump Capitol insurrectionBiden goes on offensive against economic critics, argues rising wages show his agenda is workingThe new funding would be used to “support core public health capacity improvements in States and Territories, modernize public health data collection nationwide, train new epidemiologists and other public health experts, and rebuild international capacity to detect, prepare for, and respond to emerging global threats,” the OMB said.While the CDC funding request is a big increase from recent years, it comprises just a small slice of Biden’s $6 trillion budget proposal for 2022. The request wraps in funding for a double-barreled, multitrillion-dollar economic overhaul plan that the president unveiled earlier this year.More than 33 million Covid infections, and at least 593,466 deaths, have been reported in the U.S., according to data from Johns Hopkins University.From before Covid was even officially labeled a pandemic, the CDC has issued guidance on how to slow or prevent the spread of the virus in different environments, from summer camps to nursing homes. The agency has now issued and updated more than 200 guidance documents, its website shows.But the budget proposal would go beyond funding the agency’s disease-focused work.The budget materials say $153 million would be allocated for the CDC’s Social Determinants of Health program to work on “improving health equity and data collection for racial and ethnic populations.”The government would also provide $100 million for the CDC’s Climate and Health program as part of a $1.2 billion investment in strengthening resilience to wildfires, floods, droughts and other climate-related disasters.The budget request for the Health and Human Services Department would double firearm violence prevention research at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.Overall, HHS is requesting $133.7 billion in discretionary funding — a $25.3 billion, or 23.4%, bump from the enacted budget of fiscal 2021. More