The already-frenzied category of magazines devoted to everything Brad, Angelina, Paris, Tom and Katie is soon to have a new entrant -- and this one has an edge over the others.

This summer, OK!, a celebrity-drenched weekly magazine from the United Kingdom, will hit newsstands with an American version, and it won't just be offering up more paparazzi shots. Instead, its editors pay celebrities large sums of money for exclusive access to their homes, weddings and newborn babies. The stars also get to approve the pictures and the text.

Already, a representative of OK! USA has approached hotel heiress Paris Hilton with an offer of $2 million for exclusive rights to her wedding to Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis, according to people familiar with the situation.

Brian MacLaurin, a spokesman for London-based parent company Northern & Shell PLC, confirmed the approach but not the dollar amount. He added that the magazine had also approached Tom Cruise and Michael Jackson with similar offers of money.

These tactics are viewed warily by competitors in the U.S., including US Weekly, InTouch, Star and People. They fear the effects OK! USA will have when already bidding wars are pricing exclusive photography in the high six figures. That money currently goes to photographers, however. And while magazines often compete in a gray area between celebrity journalism and celebrity collusion, the U.S. magazines say approval rights and direct payments to the subjects of photos and articles cross a line.

"It's juicing a system that's already overheated with money," says Kent Brownridge, senior vice president and spokesman for Wenner Media LLC's US Weekly, which recently paid $500,000 for a photograph of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie standing on a beach. "It is something that everyone in the weekly category will be paying very, very close attention to."

Stars love publicity, and magazines love stars, but it's often a rocky romance. Relations today are particularly rancorous because of a new twist being fed particularly by Star and Us Weekly: bringing celebrities down a peg by depicting them in frumpy sweat suits or showing cellulite on the beach.

Which is part of why many Hollywood stars and their publicists could welcome OK! USA with open arms. "Why shouldn't the stars benefit?" says Leslie Sloane Zelnik, a publicist at BWR Public Relations, a subsidiary of WPP Group's Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, who represents pop singer Britney Spears and actress Lindsay Lohan. She says she relishes the control such an arrangement would provide her, although she adds that financially it would be against her firm's policy to take a commission. Other publicists said they would consider taking money.

Martha Nelson, the managing editor of People magazine, a publication of Time Warner Inc., says OK! USA's arrival was an unhealthy development for the credibility of celebrity weeklies. "Everything becomes a commodity," says Ms. Nelson. "It assumes that everything has a price. That's not necessarily true. There are people and situations that don't have a price."

But some stars may be reluctant partners. Already, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones and her husband, actor Michael Douglas, have offered a cautionary tale. In 2000, they were paid a reported $1.4 million for their wedding photos by OK! in Britain -- only to be scooped by Hello magazine, a competing title, which crashed the event and got its own photos. In a lawsuit brought against Hello by OK! and Ms. Zeta-Jones, the actress defended the value of her wedding photos and the British press excoriated her as greedy.

Editors here say readers will notice the difference between a hard-earned scoop and a paid-for sneak peak at a star's baby. "I don't think that's going to go over at all with the American public," says Bonnie Fuller, the editorial director of American Media Inc.'s stable of celebrity magazines that includes Star and Celebrity Living. "People want scoops. They want to know what the real story is, as opposed to the prepackaged story that the celebrity or the publicist wants to dole out."

The battle will be played out on the checkout line. Northern & Shell has already secured a deal with Comag Marketing Group, a jointly owned company of Hearst Corp. and Conde Nast Publications Inc., which also places US Weekly into magazine racks. Because of intense newsstand competition among the celebrity weeklies, OK! USA needs to get into at least 100,000 well-placed "pockets," circulation experts say. The pockets are leased from distribution companies for initial fees ranging as high as $100 a pop, with smaller annual fees following.

Richard Spencer, the editor of InTouch Weekly, which is published by New Jersey-based Bauer Publishing USA, a unit of H. Bauer Publishing, says most A-list celebrities who seek publicity will choose a magazine with a wider circulation over a payment that gets them fewer readers. "Do you want to be seen by a million viewers or have a little more money in the bank and be seen by fewer people?" he asks.

While an exclusive photograph can increase sales by significant numbers, it's not always a slam dunk. The issue of US Weekly featuring Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie, for instance, sold 1.1 million copies on the newsstand, against an average of 1.05 million copies over the last 12 issues.

Richard Desmond, the owner of Northern & Shell, is another in a long line of colorful British publishing figures. He built his business selling pornographic magazines like Asian Babes before acquiring OK! and a number of daily newspapers. "Dirty Des," as he is often referred in the British press, offsets huge payments to celebrities by distributing his exclusives to international editions of OK! in places like China, Australia and the Middle East.

People, US Weekly, InTouch and Star all say they don't pay stars directly for access. But some have found loopholes: People magazine, for example, recently struck a financial deal for exclusive photos of Britney Spears's wedding. "We had our own deal directly with Britney's people," says Sandi S. Werfel, a spokeswoman for People. "Money went to her charity."