In an interview posted online Thursday, George Lucas said the trio from the original "Star Wars" trilogy will reprise their iconic roles of Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia in the new "Star Wars" film.

Lucas told Bloomberg Businessweek that all three were signed for the new "Episode VII" film in advance of Lucasfilm's $4 billion purchase by Disney.

"We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison — or were pretty much in the final stages of negotiation," Lucas said.

He added: "Maybe I'm not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-de-do."

In an interview posted Wednesday with Florida's Palm Beach Illustrated, Fisher said that she'll be coming back as Princess Leia.

Disney's Lucasfilm was coy in response. In a statement, a spokesperson for the company said, "George couldn't say whether they were signed or not and neither can we. As Yoda said, 'Always in motion is the future.' Stay tuned."

The Walt Disney Co. is producing a new "Star Wars" trilogy to take place after Lucas' original three space epics. J.J. Abrams is directing the first film. The 70-year-old Ford, the 61-year-old Hamill and the 56-year-old Fisher are expected to play smaller, supporting roles.

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The Universal comedy earned $14.1 million on the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, enough to regain the box-office title after losing it last week to 20th Century Fox's "A Good Day to Die Hard," the Bruce Willis action sequel.

With a cumulative total of $93.7 million, "Identity Thief" is the biggest hit so far in 2013. Though the film has been badly reviewed by critics, the road trip duo of McCarthy and Jason Bateman has proved popular at the multiplexes, where no other comedy has been around to challenge it.

More than anything, "Identity Thief" has proven the stardom of McCarthy, following her breakout performance in "Bridesmaids."

"The holding power of a film always gives you an idea of the strength of its concept or its star," said Nikki Rocco, Universal head of distribution. "In this case, it's both."

With the industry gathering for the Oscars on Sunday, it's always a weekend where moviegoers' attention goes more to the Academy Awards than the movie theater. For the fifth week in a row, the box office was down as compared to last year's business

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I thought the episode itself might have been kind of a dud, but it wasn't. I was proud of it. I was satisfied that we'd done something. What I didn't understand was that the ending would be so talked-about that it would completely obliterate the rest of the episode that came before it. No one ever even saw it, talked about it, mentioned it or anything about it - and I think didn't even interpret it correctly because all they talked about was that ending. I did not know that would happen.

I think a lot of people thought they were being made a fool of, that I was being really meta - is that the word? - and postmodern or just showing my quote-unquote "contempt" for the audience or going "Ha, ha, ha. It's just a TV show." None of that was what was going on. That was the best ending I knew to come up with and I thought it said some things but people didn't get it because they were angry. Or maybe it wasn't executed well.

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In all Chase's time toiling as a writer in television before "The Sopranos" — decades ranging from "The Rockford Files" to "Northern Exposure" — the big screen had beckoned. It reached back to his days as a teenager taking stills of "8 ½" and "Dr. Strangelove" (clear touchstones, still: one, Italian and surreal; the other, darkly comic).

After his first stab at writing a psychological thriller went begging, he turned to an idea of his since the '80s, one he occasionally kicked around in the "Sopranos" writers room.

"I love rock 'n' roll so much that I really wanted to make a movie about the music, not about the personalities involved, not about the ups and downs or the rise and fall of it," says Chase. "I didn't want to do a biopic. If it was going to be a biopic, I wanted to do a biopic about nobodies — which is what it kind of is."

"Not Fade Away," which Paramount Pictures will open in limited release Friday, is Chase's first project since "The Sopranos" remade American pop culture and, among other things, forever changed our relationship to Journey. A coming-of-age tale set amid the generational tumult of the '60s, it's the debut of the most promising 67-year-old filmmaker to come along in some time.

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The Warner Bros. Middle Earth epic was the biggest December opening ever, surpassing Will Smith's "I Am Legend," which opened with $77.2 million in 2007, according to studio estimates Sunday. "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" also passed the December opening of "Avatar," which opened with $77 million. Internationally, "The Hobbit" also added $138.2 million, for an impressive global debut of $223 million.

Despite weak reviews, the 3-D adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's first novel in the fantasy series was an even bigger draw than the last "Lord of the Rings" movie, "The Return of the King." That film opened with $72.6 million. "The Hobbit" is the first of another planned trilogy, with two more films to be squeezed out of Tolkien's book.

While Jackson's "Rings" movies drew many accolades - "The Return of the King" won best picture from the Academy Awards - the path for "The Hobbit" has been rockier. It received no Golden Globes nominations on Thursday, though all three "Rings" films were nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for best picture.

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Disney's "Wreck-It Ralph" opened strongly with $49.1 million and Robert Zemeckis' "Flight," starring Denzel Washington, soared to a $25 million debut. Both opened above expectations, capitalizing on East Coast audiences looking for distraction amid the recovery from the storm.

"Wreck-It Ralph," a 3-D animated family film about a video game villain who tries to break free of his role, is the largest box-office opening ever for Walt Disney Animation, which has produced countless cartoon classics (though doesn't include Disney's lucrative Pixar Animation).

Though the hurricane had forced the closure of hundreds of movie theaters in the New York, New Jersey area, most were open for business by the weekend. As many as 100 theaters were still closed on Friday, but many of those were restored during the weekend.

"We didn't really have a playbook for this," said Hollywood.com box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "But the numbers show that audiences across the country, and particularly in the Northeast, wanted to go to the movies and they did."

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So central has Pena been to film in New York over the last 25 years that for many merely sitting in front of a movie screen here is likely to bring him to mind. As the programming director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and chairman of the New York Film Festival selection committee, he's one of the city's most devoted advocates of global cinema.

This year's New York Film Festival, the 50th, is also Pena's last. After 25 years, Pena is retiring at the end of the year.

"I'd be really pleased to be known as the person who kept the — what I think — extremely high level of the festival constant," Pena said in a recent interview in Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. "That indeed I was given a trust in 1988 and I didn't screw up."

Most would give him far more credit than that. Pena has overseen film at Lincoln Center through a tumultuous period that's seen the graying of art house audiences, the birth of digital filmmaking and distribution, the exponential growth of film festivals and the shift of the art film's epicenter away from Europe and toward the Middle East, Asia and South America.

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That's the disappointing basis of "The Watch," which unfolds not in a way that might have anything funny or enlightening to say about picket-fence fearfulness, but simply with conventional summer movie bombast.

Evan Troutwig (Ben Stiller) is as devoted to Glenville, Ohio, as Max Fischer was to Rushmore Academy. Though he and his wife (an underused Rosemarie DeWitt) are trying to have a kid, he puts most of his energy into the town through various community groups and his senior management position at Costco.

This is a particularly earnest Ben Stiller: "I don't have any black friends yet, but I am on the market," he says. But Evan's enthusiasm is shattered when a friend and Costco security guard (Joseph A. Nunez) is mysteriously mauled overnight. When Evan makes neighborhood safety his new cause (his sweatshirt: "No More Murders"), his rally for support draws derision and only three volunteers.

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The comedian announced Monday evening that he'll charge a flat, no-fee rate of $45 to all of the shows on a 39-city tour he kicks off in October. Tickets will bypass ticketing services and are available only through louisck.com.

That's similar to how he sold downloads of his special "Live at the Beacon" for $5, a move that was widely hailed and has since been imitated by other comics like Jim Gaffigan and Aziz Ansari. It made more than $1 million in 12 days.

"I'm trying something new, building on the fun, success and fan-benefit of selling my content online," the comedian, whose FX show "Louie" debuts its third season Thursday, said in an email to fans.

In an effort to deter scalping, he pledged that any tickets sold above the original price will be canceled. True-market value for a show by Louis C.K., one of the most popular stand-ups in the country, would fetch higher prices. (Online ticketing company Etix is assisting the comedian's sale.)

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How many times have we asked that question across nearly four decades?

"Impossible!" said some in 2006 when Tina Fey, Chris Parnell, Horatio Sanz and Rachel Dratch headed for the door, only to be followed two years later by her friend and "Weekend Update" co-host Amy Poehler.

But in their wake grew one of the most versatile, multi-threat casts in "SNL" history, one that firmly established its own "SNL" era. Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Bill Hader and Jason Sudeikis all became cast members in the 2005-2006 season, joining a group that already included Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen and Kenan Thompson.

At the time, "SNL" creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels pronounced them "the wave of the future" and Fey likened herself to a senior seeing "exciting freshmen" arrive. But as this latest season of the sketch institution comes to a close this Saturday night (with host Mick Jagger, and musical guests Arcade Fire and the Foo Fighters), there's a growing sense that another "SNL" class is nearing graduation.

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Except for the Oscars, it's the flashiest red carpet in the world, a ruby staircase flanked by tuxedoed photographers — and a world away from financial turmoil.

Yet Cannes, the 65th edition of which starts Wednesday, fetes its directors as much as it does its stars. This year, there are plenty of both: esteemed international filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Michael Haneke to big-name talent like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman.

Among the 22 films in competition, there's a particularly large American contingent, starting with the opening night film, Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom." The movie about adolescent love on the run brings a few new actors (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton) into Anderson's carefully orchestrated world.

Later, there's David Cronenberg's Don DeLillo adaptation "Cosmopolis," starring Robert Pattinson, and Walter Salles' ("The Motorcycle Diaries") anticipated adaptation of Jack Kerouac's beloved "On the Road." That film, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, stars Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund, but has attracted more attention for its supporting roles, including Pattinson's "Twilight" co-star Kristen Stewart as Dean Moriarty's girlfriend.

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Javier Nunez Florian and Analin de la Rua de la Torre disappeared in Miami during a layover last week. The film, "Una Noche," premiered at Tribeca on Thursday.

Where the 20-year-old actors went remains unknown, but they are assumed to have defected. A third actor, Dariel Arrechada, continued on to New York where he has participated in the festival. He is scheduled to return to Cuba.

"Una Noche" is about teenagers struggling in poverty who decide to defect to the United States. Director Lucy Mulloy shot the film in Cuba.

The festival said in a statement that it has not had any contact with the actors.

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Comedy Central announced Friday that the host of "The Colbert Report" is putting one of his portraits up for auction. Colbert has repeatedly had himself painted in comically self-aggrandizing style. This one is referred to as "Portrait 5, Stephen(s)."

But it's potentially the most valuable: Artists Frank Stella, Shepard Fairey and Andrew Serrano each added their touch to the work in December.

It will be sold March 8 by auction house Phillips de Pury & Company, with proceeds going to DonorsChoose.org.

Another Colbert portrait was hung in Washington's National Portrait Gallery in 2008. Despite his conservative pundit's disregard for high culture, Colbert has increasingly embraced the art world. He recently claimed to be the elusive graffiti artist Banksy.

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"Thirty-five minutes to go-every vote is needed!" read Angle's Facebook page shortly before polls closed. "You, your neighbor, your mother-in-law ... GET OUT & vote, NV!"

Reid, who was also exhorting his followers to relay his messages online, ultimately prevailed. But the postings showed that at the most crucial moments in the 2010 election, social media was in the thick of it.

For an entity that effectively didn't exist just years ago, social media has rapidly flourished as a political force.

"This is the election when it became more deeply embedded in the rhythms of campaigning," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "It's not so much that as a single thing it influences people's votes but that it's now so inextricably a part of the political communication landscape."

The 2010 elections may also have been when Republicans truly embraced it. The change was evident at the finale, when House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner tweeted congratulations to a litany of triumphant Republicans and fellow Twitter users.

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He has already auditioned for the U.S. bobsled, skating and curling teams. He has angered a sizable portion of Canada. And he has landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated's Olympic preview.

Now, he's preparing for the big event. While "The Colbert Report" is in repeats next week, the comedian will be in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the first week of the Olympics. He'll be there recording a wealth of material for his show (to air beginning Feb. 22), attending events, conducting interviews and doing a kind of half-show from a stage set up outside the Olympic center.

"We'll bring snow because I don't think Vancouver has any," he said in an interview, taking a swipe at the city's sometimes watery precipitation.

Just as he has inserted himself into big events such as the 2008 election (during which he was briefly and illegitimately a candidate) and the Iraq war (he did a week of shows from Baghdad in 2009), Colbert has made himself a key figure for the XXI Olympic Games, which start Friday.

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The group, which announced its selections Monday, also awarded best director to Kathryn Bigelow of "The Hurt Locker." Those choices mirrored the selections of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which were announced Sunday.

The New York critics picked Meryl Streep for best actress for her performance in "Julie & Julia." It was her fourth award from the group.

Best actor went to George Clooney, who was chosen for "Up in the Air" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox." The latter, Wes Anderson's stop-motion animated movie, won for best animated film.

Christoph Waltz, who played a menacing Nazi in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," won best supporting actor. Best actress went to Mo'Nique for her performance as the mother in "Precious."

The New York Film Critics Circle Awards are among the drumbeat of critics' prizes leading up to the Academy Awards on March 7. Oscar nominations are announced Feb. 2. Nominations for the Golden Globes, perhaps the most high profile of the earlier awards, were to be announced Tuesday by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

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