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Full Disclosure: I own a comic book store, the largest in Indiana. We get a VERY wide cross section of customers that come in with spouses and I would always ask the customers what their spouse thought of the trailers. Overwhelmingly so I got responses like "He loved the trailer" or "She can't stand super hero movies, but she was laughing during the trailer I showed her.” So clearly the marketing was reaching out and hitting that nerve of the general public. From trailer one showing what a group of scoundrels they are and John C. Reilly's GREAT delivery of their rap sheets, people were hooked. If I can borrow a line, people were looking for a group of people who aimed to misbehave in a movie that was, most of all, fun.

The Marvel Studios brand has built such a name of reliability for itself that the general movie-goer trusts. Right now, they trust it so much that people out there are willing to go along and give a Marvel Studios movie a shot before outright saying no to it.

And lastly, this summer has been VERY lackluster in terms of major box office blockbusters (except Transformers, apparently) that people want to see repeatedly. Marvel Studios and The Guardians of the Galaxy just gave them one.

Kim Hollis: I’m going to go back to something Matt mentioned. I believe that the buzz for Guardians of the Galaxy truly reached a high level right around the time that Comic-Con was happening. Obviously we can’t credit that convention for all of the tickets sold, but I do think that the marketing and the conversations that were happening around the film at the time represented a tonal shift in what we’d been seeing up to that point. Disney and Marvel both deserve a lot of credit for doing a good job of building anticipation for the film from start to finish, particularly in finding a way to appeal to all demographics across the board.

Max Braden: First off, I think we need to mention the advertising. The campaign for this movie was incessant, more frequent than any movie I can think of in recent years. I saw the trailer everywhere on television, and much further out from release date than I normally see. They also promoted the movie with a free clip screening (which now makes me wonder if that was all the material from the trailers that they left out of the movie).

But of course you can advertise 24/7 and if you don't have the material to back it then the advertising will go to waste. What I saw in the trailer was what works well for August movies - more adult, stir crazy humor (in addition to grittier sci-fi). Movies like the Rush Hour series, American Pie series, Superbad, Tropic Thunder, The Other Guys, and The Expendables were August releases that feed that end-of-the-summer craving for something more irreverent than the straight up heroes and comedies we get earlier in the summer. Comparisons to Star Wars and Serenity are closest, but I'm thinking of some others. Chris Pratt's conceited, trash-talking, anti-authority cad reminds me of Will Smith in Men In Black, Ryan Reynolds in Blade III, and of course Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man. The rag tag group reminds me of The A-Team (in which Bradley Cooper appeared) and The Losers (in which Zoe Saldana appeared, and which was a DC Comics property). When you tempt audiences with the possibilities of dialogue and attitude, suggesting anything can happen, they'll flock to find out how the movie makers played with their tools.

In short, audiences took this seriously because it was clear the movie didn't take itself seriously.

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