Sequels and comparative reading

Both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly write today about the inundation of sequels coming to theaters in 2007, including the smaller second films like The Hills Have Eyes 2 and third entries into major franchises such as Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Shrek the Third. More about the sequel phenomenon at the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly.

The story is the same in both papers, and its the same recycled one we get each year -- studios like sequels. What I was struck by, however, is just how boring to read the LA Times article was, compared to the LA Weekly column. Here's an example from the Weekly (but worth reading in full):

Orgy of Sequels Climaxing in 2007
Will the public get off? Or is it just studio masturbation?
By NIKKI FINKE
Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - 2:20 pm
It’s official: Hollywood has run out of original ideas.If you thought 2006 was bad, just wait. In 2007, the studios will give up on birthing blockbusters and concentrate instead on cloning them to knock off lame sequel after lamer sequel after lamest sequel. Familiar titles will be followed by so many numbers that filmgoers looking for a Friday-night flick will need a calculator just to figure out which of the threequels and fourquels they want to see — if any at all.Oh, and if the year of living sequentially doesn’t destroy the movie biz, then the expected labor strike (also a sequel) will.
...it simply takes too much moola to create awareness for new product — in marketing parlance, this is known as “audience creation.” It’s a given that with franchises and remakes, the awareness for under-25 males — the most coveted category of moviegoers — approaches 100 percent. But with original stories, that awareness level drops below 60 percent. And, when the average cost to make a movie (as of 2005) stands at $96.2 million, and marketing costs at $36.2 million per pic, it stands to reason that studios are loath to gamble on unproven concepts. Riding coattails takes the risk out of a notoriously risky biz, which means moguls can have fewer Maalox moments in what is tantamount to a life on meth. Production has dwindled to just a dozen films from each major each year, most of them sequels."

Now compare that to the Times:

Sequels come back to rule box office in '06
Pirates, mutants and animated mammals lead the charge to box office riches.
By Josh Friedman and Claudia Eller, Times Staff WritersDecember 19, 2006

The star of Hollywood's 2006 box-office recovery: the sequel.Led by "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "X-Men: The Last Stand" and "Ice Age: The Meltdown," grosses in the U.S. and Canada are poised this week to overtake the $8.9 billion in receipts for all of 2005.Six of the year's 12 biggest movies were sequels. Successors to previous hits grossed $2 billion, some 40% more than they did last year."While nothing is a slam dunk in this business," said Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook, "at least going in there's a comfort level knowing that audiences have embraced these characters and the worlds that have been created."And get ready for more. The next few months are shaping up as an arms race of sequels, with studios rolling out new versions of some of their biggest all-time blockbusters ..."

No wonder the daily newspaper is struggling. What's interesting is that while the articles are both about studios playing it safe, and doing better financially for it, the opposite is true in publishing where writing for mass consumption no longer seems viable as blogs and podcasts which allow for more specialized (and "hipper") coverage draws away readership. Any thoughts? (Probably not, as we go about moving to LA, etc.)