So first of all, lemme explain my fuckup; I was going off of Wikipedia, where I saw Hereditary had grossed $77.5M and Lady bird had grossed about $76.9 million. Someone pointed out in the comments that this was incorrect, which confused me. However once I went to BoxofficeMojo I saw Lady Bird was actually at about $78M, just ahead of HEREDITARY.
The reason for this?
Wikipedia hadn't updated its box office statistic since February, meaning it was out of date
And yet, nobody at the following news outlets bothered to double check.
Just for clarifications sake, I went off Wikipedia when I should've used BoxOfficeMojo, and HEREDITARY is still a few hundred grand behind LADY BIRD.
IndieWire: https://www.indiewire.com/2018/07/hereditary-a24-box-office-record-worldwide-1201988413/
Deadline: https://deadline.com/2018/07/hereditary-a24-highest-grossing-worldwide-movie-box-office-1202433883/
Hypebeast: https://hypebeast.com/2018/7/hereditary-highest-grossing-indie-release
All three of these were using Wikipedia and not BoxOfficeMojo, because although the Wikipedia source was BOM, it hadn't been updated correctly.
That means either all of these sources saw my reddit post and just used Wikipedia as a source or they just used wikipedia without fact checking themselves.
How embarassing.