Director Pete Docter’s Soul, about how a school teacher and jazz musician (voiced by Jamie Foxx) seeks to reunite his body and soul after they were accidentally separated, is exhibiting robust life in the international box office.

Earning $36 million in China alone, the animated film is poised to become one of Pixar’s highest grossing movies in that huge Asian market. Soul, also voiced by Tina Fey, Angela Bassett, Graham Norton, Alice Braga, Daveed Diggs, and Wes Studi, is predicted to surpass Finding Dory’s earnings of $38.4 million in China.

Time will tell if Soul has enough spirit to also fly past Pixar’s top-grossing movies in China, Coco and Incredibles 2.

The movie that shows The Great Beyond and The Great Before earned $8.9 million in 11 other countries.  That haul added to Soul’s cumulative international box office take of $47.3 million so far. The Pixar film wasn’t released in U.S. theaters and instead debuted exclusively on Disney Plus.

Another animated film, The Croods: A New Age, showed impressive staying power as it drew $5.05 million in 17 overseas markets. That increased the Universal and DreamWorks Animation sequel’s international overall take of $90.95 million and raised its global tally to $127.83 million.

On the domestic box office scene – with no new nationwide releases – Wonder Woman 1984 easily stayed on top with $3 million. But that figure reflects the continued significant plummeting of Gal Gadot’s superheroine movie sequel – a 45 % drop from last weekend’s earnings.

The domestic box office earnings of filmmaker Patty Jenkins’ second Wonder Woman movie is $32.6 million so far. Of course, the conditions this time around for the sequel are vastly different. With the coronavirus pandemic still peaking in the United States, only 35 percent (some estimate 40 percent) of movie houses are open.

And WarnerMedia, the corporate parent of both Warner Bros. and HBO Max, made the controversial decision to debut Wonder Woman 1984 simultaneously in cineplexes and homes (via HBO Max).

Still doing well in the domestic box office charts is The Croods 2, which ranked second and raked in another $1.81 million. The animated film has scored $36.88 million so far.

On its third weekend, Tom Hanks’ News of the World placed third with $1.24 million for a cumulative take in North America of $7.1 million so far.

Milla Jovovich’s action-adventure-fantasy, Monster Hunter, took the fourth spot with $1.1 million and a domestic tally of $7.81 after four weekends.

Occupying the fifth berth is Hilary Swank’s Fatale, which took in $670,000 for a total take of $4.01 million.

Carey Mulligan’s Promising Young Woman grabbed $560,000 to land in sixth place and to add to its domestic earnings of $2.7 million so far.

In the streaming ratings race, an old office mockumentary sitcom beat a space Western series featuring Baby Yoda. Nielsen, which lags in its reporting of the Top 10 SVOD chart, announced that for the week of December 7 to 13, Steve Carell’s The Office, which ended its NBC run in 2013, is tops again in its Netflix incarnation.

The Office, set in a Pennsylvania paper company office, was watched for an estimated 1.3 billion minutes. The Mandalorian, on the other hand, drew 1 billion minutes of viewing. That placed the Disney Plus’ Star Wars spinoff series, starring Pedro Pascal in the title role, in second place.

The Mandalorian was the only show that broke Netflix’s dominance of the top 10 SVOD chart.

The other Netflix shows that made it to the chart were Virgin River, The Crown, Manhunt: Deadly Games, Supernatural, Grey’s Anatomy, Criminal Minds, Big Mouth and Schitt’s Creek.