The Year of The 3quel

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Look at the numbers. Of the top 10 worldwide box-office champs as tabulated by Boxofficemojo.com all except the No. 1 Titanic are franchise movies, and seven of those nine are sequels--episodes of Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean and Shrek. (That's in actual figures. In inflation-adjusted dollars, 1939's Gone With the Wind is still the all-time winner, and no sequels make the top 10.) Dead Man's Chest, last year's second installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, was only the third film in history, after Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, to earn more than $1 billion in theaters.

More threequels are in store after Spidey, Shrek and Captain Jack have fleeced you. On June 8, Ocean's Thirteen, with George Clooney heading an all-star cast in the heist series that so far has cadged $814 million. And on Aug. 10, Rush Hour 3, the Jackie Chan-- Chris Tucker action-comedy whose predecessors have grossed $592 million.

If it works three times, keep on cloning. That's why Friday the 13th begat nine sequels, A Nightmare on Elm Street had six, the two franchise villains faced off in Freddy vs. Jason, and James Bond has saved the world in 23 hits since 1962. Meanwhile, the Harry Potter series is headed for a Proustian seven. The first four film adaptations of J.K. Rowling's epic rank fourth, ninth, 10th and 17th on the all-time box-office list. The fifth, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will be calling all wizards on July 13.

The Potter series was launched with high hopes. But some films are out-of-nowhere hits. Says Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer: "You take a movie based on a theme-park ride about pirates, and you had not very high expectations. After we had such an unexpected hit with the first Pirates movie, there was pressure to do something bigger and better, which we somehow did." Prudently, Bruckheimer shot the second and third Pirates films simultaneously, reducing the overall budget. Yet each sequel cost in the $200 million neighborhood, 50% more than the price of the original.

That's one of the many challenges for threequels: everybody's fee goes up, again. "We always want to get paid more," Bruckheimer says. "That's understandable." And no one's salary rockets higher than the stars'. "They are the face of their franchises," Pandya says. "Whatever compensation Johnny Depp gets, he's a bargain for Disney." The leads also lend emotional continuity to the new episodes. "I really don't think you can change the actors," says Brett Ratner, director of the Rush Hour films. "Without Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, Rush Hour 3 would not exist. There's no Jet Li-- Chris Rock version."

The lucky producers are the ones who make animated films like Shrek. Mike Myers gets paid handsomely for a few days' work as the green ogre's voice, but the creature himself doesn't demand profit participation. Thus Shrek the Third could cost less than $100 million. In sequel land, that's practically a Sundance-movie number.

Cost management aside, threequel makers need to serve up the familiar product but in a larger size. "The third one is about giving more,"says Ratner, who has also directed third films in the X-Men and Hannibal Lecter series. "More action if it's an action film, more laughs if it's a comedy, and all without compromising or changing the characters."