Charles Bramesco

The emperor of planet Playboy made the world a safer place for sex, leaving behind a complicated legacy.

We’ve got 11 long months to go before anyone will get a look at Star Wars: Episode VIII, so Lucasfilm has tried to pace itself with leaking details of the hotly anticipated upcoming release. Today, however, they dropped a big one: on the official Star Wars web site, a new announcement revealed the subtitle for the eighth installment in what the site refers to as “the Skywalker saga.” The post declared, “We have the greatest fans in this or any other galaxy. In appreciation of the fans, we wanted them to be the first to know the title of the next chapter in the Skywalker saga: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.”

The most widely recognized iterations of Batman’s constant foe the Joker would probably have to be Heath Ledger as the unchained mad-dog of The Dark Knight, Jack Nicholson as an urbane creep in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, and to a lesser extent, Cesar Romero’s campy turn in the goofy TV series from the ’60s. But Mark Hamill logged more hours as the Clown Prince of Crime than the rest of them put together, voicing the Joker in the long-running animated series and its many spin-offs. The man with the greatest claim to the Joker persona dusted off his special crazy-voice this week for a more pointedly political purpose than the usual cocktail-party entertainment.

It’s the Friday before Christmas. Those of us who aren’t currently concealing the fact that we’ve slumped over at our desks in a eggnog-hangover-induced nap have glued our eyes to the clock, counting down the minutes to a leisurely holiday break. Everyone just wants to get home, gather with family or other loved ones around a crackling fire, put on the musical stylings of Burl Ives or Bing Crosby, and have a nice mug of hot cocoa. Time slows to a crawl on the Friday before a long weekend, and we both know you’re not getting any work done today, so why not kick back with the soothing sounds of Chewbacca moaning out a classic Christmas standard?

Get a few drinks in a group of guy-pals, and antics inevitably arise: doing donuts in an abandoned parking lot, maybe hitting a strip club, the odd snowmobile expedition to the North Pole — you know, guy stuff. That last one actually happened to a group of foolhardy drinking buddies in 1968 Minnesota, too, and now Deadline reports that Will Ferrell and Sony have set about recreating the epic journ

There’s still quite a while to go until the July 15, 2016 release date of Paul Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot, but the fires of fan anticipation must be continually stoked if they’re going to burn strong enough to last through the winter, and the wasteland of pop-cultural apathy that is the month of January...

Val Kilmer has taken to his personal Facebook page to post a Top Gun 2 status update with ramifications on a scale that we can only describe as tectonic.

Walker’s daughter Meadow filed a lawsuit against Porsche under the banner of “wrongful death,” attributing her father’s untimely death to numerous defects in the car’s design. Industry trade papers are now reporting that officials from Porsche have handed down a response to the lawsuit, claiming that the accident and any injuries sustained therein were ultimately Walker and Rodas’ “own comparative fault.”