Congratulations, you've made a hit summer movie! Enjoy the fellatio: You've earned it!

All done? Good, because now everyone is dying to know what you're going to do next (i.e., if it will make as much money and/or not suck). Don't panic. Scientists have identified exactly what happens to hit summer movies as they go from long-shot first film to tired, hackneyed retread, and beyond:

Initial Phase: Great idea, but no one is really sure if it's going to work. After securing meager funding from a timid studio chief on the verge of getting fired, you lure a cast of largely unknowns. Everyone is hungry and enthusiastic. A lot of your best ideas get cut for budgetary reasons. People eat it up.

Second Phase: Now you're riding the wave! You've managed to lure back most of your principal cast, except for a headliner or two, the ones who let the success of the first go to their heads and have moved on to other, more pompous projects. Now you have the budget to do all those great ideas that got cut out of the first movie, only now they're bloated and over-thought. You're forced to start shooting before the script is finished, which doesn't stop the resulting film from ending up a half-hour too long. Critics almost universally declare that the sequel is less inspired than the original, but they know it's pointless to pan a sure-fire hit, so they give it a pass for fear that it might turn out to be another runaway success.

Third Phase: Now the concept is running out of steam, and the writers (all six of them) are reaching. A good portion of the film is made up of strung-together scenes not good enough for the first two. Only the most marginal of cast members return, except for one or two of the principles whose high-profile projects have subsequently crashed and burned and could use a paycheck. Everyone else is a TV actor on hiatus from a mediocre sitcom. The director from the first two has gone on to his "dream project" (a biopic or dramatic novel adaptation, or possibly a dramatic biography adaptation), which no one will see, although he is "executive producing." Whatever that means. Everyone says this film will be "back to the basics," to differentiate it from the disappointing grosses of the second film. In spite of this inspired creative choice, the film makes a third what the original did.

Fourth Phase: Brain death. The director of the original won't even lend his name to this derivative piece of crap, which is directed by a European with a limited grasp of English and an obsession with jump cuts. There are more credited editors than recognizable stars, and one or more talking dogs. Basic physics and logic are completely ignored. No one bothers to review it, but if they did, they would have a hard time describing the plot. Still, because of the tiny budget, it's somehow managed to lure enough gullible folks to be profitable.

Phases V-VII: Milk that puppy!

Phase IX: Straight-to-video. No one cares.

Phase X: Your franchise's highly unrealistic villain fights another film's even more unrealistic villain, by which point the audience has come full circle, and now feels nostalgic enough about the original to endure a derivative, poorly written hack job.

With that in mind, let's apply this to a franchise picked at random. Say, JURASSIC PARK. The first film was, by all accounts, a huge hit and a technological breakthrough. All right, so it's directed by the most successful director of all time, but even he can't escape franchise law. JPII? Bloated? Check. Uninspired? Check. Going through the motions? Check. And then we have JPIII, absolute proof that sequelitis is in full effect. Spielberg bolted. Sam Neill has been lured back, fresh off of MY MOTHER FRANK and TV's MERLIN, spouting lines like "No force on Earth or Hell could get me on that island," only to wind up going back mere minutes later when someone writes him a bad check.

After that, it's 90 minutes of white people doing Incredibly Stupid Things. For those of you planning to visit Jurassic Park, here's a few tips. Never:

• Head into an open field.
• Call out anyone's name.
• Move faster than a brisk walk.
• Be least attractive one in the group.

Somehow, this still managed to make a boatload of money, although a considerably smaller boat than the first two. And still, I have yet to meet anyone who remembers seeing it. This could be the nature of the movie or my social circle, it's hard to say. But when a film makes $180 million, you'd expect to bump into one or two people who recall it. Nope. Doesn't happen.

Still, they've announced JPIV for next year. It's a safe bet that it will make no sense whatsoever, and star Jennifer Love Hewitt, or possibly an Osment or two. By 2008's JPVII, the dinosaurs will be reduced to managing a daycare full of sassy children.

And so the circle of life continues. At least until you run into an open field.

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