Numlock Sunday: Ben Lindbergh on box office forecasting

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer who wrote “Box Office Trackers Can’t Crack the MCU Code” all about how the box office projections we all hear about actually get made. Here's what I wrote about it:

Box office prediction is a difficult component of the film industry accounting, but Endgame’s effect on the forecast certainly felt like a hurricane intensifying on approach. In early April, Variety said it was on pace for a $200 million to $260 million opening. By a few days before the premiere, that forecast was hauled up to $250 million to $268 million, while the eventual domestic total hit $357 million. This isn’t the first time the Marvel Cinematic Universe outperformed: based on one database of box office projections, the average MCU movie since 2012’s Ave…