This is a graph of how much people spend to watch each movie. If it was a graph of how Hollywood relies on sequels, it should show how much money they spent per movie.
All this shows is that people are spending their money on sequels. If people want that to change, they should spend their money on originals.
Those criteria are not indicative of a sequel. For example, Star Wars Episode IV would be considered a sequel by this metric. As would Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade. Meanwhile the first Avengers movie is, if nothing else, a sequel to Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man. Yet it doesn't count by these criteria.
Definitely searching for a point. I have enjoyed GotG3 and DS2, Shang-Chi had a lot of promise but blew it in the finale and while Thor: Love and Thunder was flawed it was still good fun.
As I've said before - they need to get back to making good movies with stories people want to tell and do the franchise building as an extra. Following Endgame they seemed to reverse that and franchise building became the most important thing. Luckily, it looks like.James Gunn knows this and isn't going to make the same mistake at DC (although the number of characters popping up in Superman has me a bit worried).
The implication is whether it's a standalone story or not.
As example, Alien 3 is certainly a sequel to Aliens, because at the end of Aliens the story wraps up nicely and is "finished" - we don't need more.
Dune 2 is more of a continuation of Dune, however because it's the next part of the same unfinished story.
The important part from the planning and development perspectives is that Avengers, Dune, and Lord of the Rings etc were always written to be several parts from the beginning.
Its the difference between "That movie made loads of money, let's make another one" and "This story is really long, we need to do it in three parts"
It's undeniable that sometimes producers will intentionally choose to "spread out" an idea into multiple movies when it could be one, specifically because they know it's a lucrative IP and they figure they can make more money that way.
I didn't touch on that because my comment was getting long enough already, but personally I'd consider those as something of a 'middle ground' between an unplanned and financially motivated sequel, and a truly planned and needed continuation.
