No surprise here that the Guardians of the Galaxy dominated the weekend box office. It’s a down year for the box office in turns of receipts, and throw in the lack of competition this past weekend. The big surprise is that it raked in more than $90 million dollars at the box office (according to box office mojo.com, around $94 million at this point). This is a big surprise as many forecasters had it at around $60ish million dollars.
The $94 million is surprising considering that this indeed is a down year and that this movie featured characters that most comic book fans aren’t even aware of. However, this goes to show the brand dominance and quality Marvel has built since 2007.
** A quick side note forecasters ( on staff or outsourced Economist )come up with these over/unders ( Vegas terms) by running multiple regression with a variety of factors (variables) and economic predictors and they use an equation to to predict performance. They are not normally this off, even though predicting the future is a hard thing to do, but they do come close. This is what we call an outlier or the exception to the rule if you will.