Making a billion dollars is a rare feat for a film, and plenty of very successful and beloved films fall well short of the billion dollar mark. Consider that to date, only 52 of the nearly 300,000 films ever made crossed the billion-dollar box office threshold. Also realize that many, if not most, of the films that do so have at least one built-in advantage of some sort.
Take the film you mentioned, Mario Bros. It has at least three such advantages: it's a kid's film, which automatically gives it a huge potential audience, and it has three nostalgia factors working for it: older Gen X'ers who played Donkey Kong in the '80s, younger Gen X'ers who played Super Mario Bros. in the late '80s, and Millennials who played the myriad Mario games that came out in the '90s and beyond.
Look at the list of billion-dollar earners and you'll see similar at work for nearly every film there. Great as the Guardians of the Galaxy films are, they are also a niche property, and something that more or less began with the first film. Even avid comic readers were unaware of them, or vaguely aware of them at best.
Lastly, the third film will be hampered by the general slowdown of the box office in the post-pandemic world. People simply aren't going to the theater anywhere nearly as often as before.
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