Second-Helping Summer

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Franchise: it's Hollywood's magic word. For decades, the moguls groused because their products, unlike cars and potato chips, were not endlessly reproducible. The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music were the up-to-their-time top grossers, but there was no Re-Birth, Re-Wind or Re-Sound. It took The Godfather, Part II, to make sequels chic. (An Oscar for Best Picture will do that.) In 1977, the opening crawl of Star Wars--announcing the film as "Episode IV: A New Hope"--stoked an endless stream of sequels, threequels and prequels, some inspired only by greed for blockbuster status they will never attain. Among this summer's underperformers are a sequel (The Chronicles of Riddick), a roundup of old movie monsters (Van Helsing) and two dips into antique legend (Troy and King Arthur). Studios might have risked less if they'd actually tried something original.

Sequels flourish especially in conservative times, when audiences are in retreat from the shock of the new. Which is why you could place a small bet on a Bush re-election; voters may choose the sequel to a wild ride over a four-year courtship with Kerry and Edwards. But if this is so, how to explain the surprise-hit status of Fahrenheit 9/11? Simple. It too is a sequel: the latest in the continuing adventures of Michael Moore, populist rebel with a cause. Remember Bowling for Columbine, kids, when Mike confronted the gun lobby and vanquished an aged Charlton Heston? Now our capped crusader aims to bring down the President of the U.S.--for real!

Of course, there's nothing new about saying there's nothing new under the sun. To the young, everything they encounter for the first time has the force of revelation; to the old, everything was done better before--when they were young. It must always have been thus. Some ancient Greek, hearing that Homer had just composed the Iliad, probably groused, "That old war story?" And when the Odyssey came around: "What? Not a sequel!"