Attack of the Sequels Part XXVVVIIIIXXXIIXIXIXIXIXIXIXIXIXI

Sequels are of course the bread and butter of the entertainment industry, and while most rightfully decry sequels as creatively bankrupt factory-assembled money machines, I also have to play devil's advocate as someone who enjoys seeing the new adventures of characters I enjoy spending a couple of hours with. I'm hopeful about the upcoming Shrek films (word is there's going to be at least two more) because the first two were damn enetertaining. I'm hopeful about the reported 4 upcoming Spider-Man films (Sony wants a total of six and Director Ted Raimi sees no problem with making that many as long as he's still invested in doing them, whatever that means).
But now we are getting sequels nobody wants from marginally succesful or just plain horrid movies or long dead franchises we no longer care about at a increasingly alarming rate. In addition to recent pure crap sequels like Ring 2, Miss Congeniality 2 & XXX: State of the Union, sooner or later we are going to see follow ups to Mrs. Doubtfire, Cheaper By The Dozen, Basic Instinct, Conan, House of The Dead, Resident Evil, The Grudge, Jurassic Park, Meet The Parents, Austin Powers, Fast and the Furious, Die Hard, Independence Day, Jumanji, The Mummy, Night of the Living Dead, The Punisher, Scary Movie, Scooby Doo, Garfield, Saw, Terminator and many, many others. It's obviously overkill when you are making sequels to movies that no one cares about anymore or didn't even care about in the first place. Is it any wonder ticket revenues keep going down even though ticket prices keep going up? It's really hard to justify spending any amount of money to see these sequels either because you know 99.9% of them are going to be inferior to the previous film which in most cases was not even worht seeing to begin with. The real problem is that studio execs obviously don't see the long term consequences of this practice. It may not even be anytime relatively soon, but eventually either the moviegoing crowd gets tired of it or the stars get tired of it or just too old to do it anymore and suddenly, the studio is screwed since they were too busy developing sequels in order to develop any original properties. Now if you'll excuse me I have to start developing my script for Howard The Duck 2....