Part 2, waste of directing talent

Due to start filming in mid-June, the latest installment in the long-dormant "Raiders" series is simply the latest example of the movie industry's maniacal devotion to sequels. With "Spider-Man 3" leading the way last weekend, making $151 million in domestic box office, this summer boasts an average of nearly one sequel a week. According to figures from Media by Numbers, there are 14 summer-release sequels in all, up from seven last year and three in 2005. The inflation is striking -- there were only 14 summer sequels made from 1998 through 2001.

Hollywood makes sequels for one good reason: They make money. The biggest summer hits of the last three years were all sequels. After its record-setting weekend, Sony Pictures chief Michael Lynton boasted to the BBC that the "Spider-Man" series may continue ad infinitum, saying. "Everybody has every intention of making a fourth, a fifth and a sixth and on and on." Geez, is that a promise or a threat?

The blind urge to make money might let studios off the hook, since there are few people left in Hollywood who expect great films to emerge from the primeval ooze of studio development. Studio chiefs are at least up-front, if you read their interviews about their desire to manage risk, create multiplatform franchises and generally treat movies as a form of brand advertising.

That leaves two culprits: the filmmakers who sign on to make the movies and the millions of filmgoers who line up to see the latest extension of the brand. I'm not a lunatic idealist. I have no beef with a journeyman taking a gig, like TV actor turned director Fred Savage doing a sequel like "Daddy Day Camp." What I find demoralizing is that so many of our most gifted filmmakers are behaving as much like careerists as anyone running a studio.

There's a list -- a short one, but still an impressive one -- of filmmakers who refuse to turn themselves into brand managers: Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Baz Luhrmann, Danny Boyle, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, David Fincher and M. Night Shyamalan, to name a few.