Summer of sequels!

Summer is finally closing in upon us and with it comes the glorious relief of good, solid, blockbuster-guaranteed movies. No more rotten comedies with banal scripts! No more B-rated horror slasher flicks with TV/movie actresses and dirty blonde tresses! The studios hold their best offerings close during the cold late winter months, to be released with the end of the school year and the floods of young people with cash to spend and the muggy weather driving people indoors for a few hours of air-conditioned entertainment.

I couldn't help noticing that accompanying the excitement that builds with every new movie poster splashed across building walls comes the observation that this summer's potential blockbusters tend to all be variations and/or extensions of previously established hits. There is probably something deep and introspective I could muse upon the degradation of cinematic originality and the loss of unique cultural entertainment... but nah. The reason why these movies are all sequels is because the original idea sold, and therefore even if the sequel sucks, at least there is some smidgen of popular demand mired within the sucky sequel atrocities. (Pirates of the Carribean 2 is distinctly coming to mind, but of course I'm still going to go see it opening weekend...)

So, I hereby rank the summer sequels in the order in which I am excited to see them:

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix -- hello, is this even a question? And a mere WEEK before the release of the final chapter!! Does Harry die?????
• Ocean's Thirteen -- looking for a redemption from Ocean's Twelve, as Ocean's Eleven still ranks as one of my all-time favorites
• The Bourne Ultimatum -- I didn't even know this one was coming, which makes the enticement all the more alluring...
• Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End -- see above re: Ocean's Thirteen. Lame but potentially redemptable. Though there's something to be said about movies that were made to stand alone and THEN sequels were squeezed out merely for box-office success. Okay, really what it is is Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. There.
  
• Shrek the Third-- Shrek 2 was one of those few sequels that was almost better (if not definitively) than the original. AND rumor has it Justin Timberlake makes a cameo as Prince Arthur, king in waiting...
• Spiderman 3 -- so this doens't really rank all that high on my list because honestly, I don't really understand what the appeal of Spiderman is over any other superhero. I'll go see it because it's Spiderman and I can never pass up a super hero. Many of you may gasp by my cinematic apostasy, but I don't see how the Spiderman movies are so much better than, say, the original two Tim Burton Batman movies or the original two Superman movies (relative to their time period, of course.) It could also be because I really just can't stand Kirsten Dunst. She really should have stopped at Little Women.
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer -- don't roll your eyes. I'm shamelessly in love with Ioan Gruffud. The end.
  

I ask you, my fellow blogging community, the following questions: Which sequels are you excited to see and why (how would you rank them, and did I miss any?), and which movie sequel do you think is the best one ever made? There are obviously so many to choose from, but for my limited mental capacity today I'm going to have to say Toy Story 2. Toy Story was amazing, but its sequel was almost impossibly even better. That is all.