More good news for Hobbit fans. The executive producer and director of the two forthcoming films based on The Hobbit, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, have announced they're keeping the writing duties at home, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

After an unsuccessful eight-month search for the right screenwriter to adapt the novel and conjure up a sequel, Jackson and del Toro have decided to write the pictures themselves alongside Jackson's writing collaborators from The Lord of the Rings, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.

Jackson had said he'd be unable to help write the screenplays because of prior commitments, but his schedule has freed up; besides, Jackson, who was deeply immersed in the development and writing of Lord of the Rings, really wanted to get involved himself. The intimate familiarity of the team with the intricacies of Middle Earth will also help the production meet release dates more easily and free up more time for getting visual magic onscreen.

The films will be shot simultaneously starting in late 2009. Co-distributors New Line and MGM hope to release The Hobbit in 2011, with the second film, covering events between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, slated for the following year.

In the final moments of Eureka's fourth episode this season, "I Do Over," Nathan Stark (Ed Quinn) seems to vanish into time, and the characters think he's dead. Fans reeled: Why kill off Nathan, a character that has grown in interesting ways since his introduction early in season 1, and who worked so effectively as a counterpoint to Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and Henry (Joe Morton)?

Is he dead? Does this leave the way clear for Carter and Allison (Salli Richardson) to get together? Is this a good thing for the show? Is it another case of killing off the third wheel, a phenomenon I discussed earlier in the year?

Check out the preliminary thinking here.

Young wizard Harry Potter is the latest victim of last winter's writers' strike: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, originally slated for Thanksgiving release, has been pushed back to next July to fill the void in the Warner Brothers' summer blockbuster schedule left by a hundred days without writers.

The irony is that the special effects-heavy film was apparently on schedule for its Nov. 21 release – in fact production is reportedly already complete. It's being moved to July 17 not because director David Yates needs more time to finish the movie, but because the studio needs a summer cash machine and expects the climactic Half-Blood Prince, the sixth film in the Harry Potter series, to deliver in spades.

"We are still feeling the repercussions of the writers strike, which impacted the readiness of scripts for other films – changing the competitive landscape for 2009 and offering new windows of opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of," said Warners president Alan Horn. "We agreed the best strategy was to move Half-Blood Prince to July, where it perfectly fills the gap for a major tentpole release for midsummer."

In other words, Half-Blood Prince is going to sit in a can for eight months just so that Warners won't have a weak summer. This despite the fact that its screenwriter, Steve Kloves, fretted to Entertainment Weekly that the Potter movies might start to tank without regular book releases to support them.
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The spate of Star Wars parodies that started turning up last year wasn't just about the original film turning 30. After all, stuff turns 30 all the time. Operation Petticoat turned 30 last year as well, but you don't see very many splashy claymation specials featuring the likenesses of John Astin and Jamie Lee Curtis. Which is a shame, really.

Star Wars, more than any other science fiction phenomenon, inspires a creative desire in those who love it most, which is why parodies like Star Wars: Robot Chicken and Family Guy: Blue Harvest, both now out on DVD, wear their devotion on their sleeves even as they send up the best and worst bits of the six-film franchise.

And the Star Wars franchise is, despite George Lucas's best (or worst) efforts, very much alive (there's a new movie out now, in case you haven't heard, setting up a CGI series coming in the fall), which means amateur Star Wars satire-tributes are still cropping up. YouTube is already littered with folks cutting their desktop special-effects teeth on videos in which AfterEffects clones try to kill each other with light sabers and finger-lightning, and the video snarks have jumped on the Star Wars bandwagon, creating clips that range from awful to hilarious to gasp-inducing (perennial parodists the Fine Brothers have discovered a use for a light saber so very, very wrong I can't even link to it).

The best of the lot is still Robot Chicken: Star Wars, if only because its rapid-fire blackouts are a perfect way to jar you into looking at Boba Fett, Emperor Palpatine, and all those minor characters only the true geeks know the names of, in a whole new way. And there's more geek-fest comedy to come: Cartoon Network has announced a sequel to the Robot Chicken special is in the works, slated to premiere Nov. 16. That's news good enough to make even Ponda Baba smile.

• Review: Robot Chicken: Star Wars
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