The Year of The 3quel

With some of the biggest box-office monsters coming back again, we hereby dub 2007 the year of the 3quel

BUENA VISTA

Geoffrey Rush, Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp have relieved viewers of $1.7 billion.

In very ancient Greece, Homer had a surprise hit. The Iliad was boffo, thanks to a strong revenge story mixing love, war and some fabulous poetic effects. So of course he thought of a sequel, spinning off one of the characters, Ulysses, into his own traveling adventure. Homer called that one The Odyssey, and it was an even bigger smash. Then, deciding he had exhausted the saga, he stopped.

That's the difference between Homer and Hollywood, where two is never enough--not if the original movie and its first sequel happened to be blockbusters. Intoxicated by the grosses of such threepeats as...

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