Sideshow: Disney buys Lucasfilm for $4 billion

OK, fanboys, get those light sabers out. A new episode of Star Wars is on its way. George Lucas has sold Lucasfilm Ltd. to the Walt Disney Co. for $4.05 billion, and Darth Vader now works for the Mouse.

Disney is planning a seventh installment in the Star Wars series for release in 2015 and wants to keep the series going beyond that, according to the Associated Press.

Disney announced the megadeal Tuesday. Chief Mouseketeer Bob Iger said in a prepared statement that the acquisition will help preserve the Star Wars series and meet a "substantial pent-up demand" for new encounters with the Force.

As for Lucas, he sounded like Obi-Wan Kenobi talking to Luke Skywalker. "It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers," Lucas said in a statement.

If only all the effects of Hurricane Sandy had been as minor as this one: Heidi Klum wisely called off her annual celeb Halloween party, People mag reports. Instead, she tweeted a photo of herself on a wet New York street, with the message: "Hope you & your loved ones are safe after the storm. Canceling my Halloween party . . . postponing to a haunted Christmas." Klum, 39, had planned to dress as Cleopatra. (We at "Sideshow" feel no need to say more about that.)

Royal in-law Pippa Middleton, 29, now as much a paparazzi magnet as her sister, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, has been seeing an awful lot of dashing financier James Matthews, 37, reports People. Pippa, who has been on tour promoting her book, Celebrate: A Year of Festivities for Families and Friends, has been photographed around London town in recent weeks with Matthews, whose brother Spencer appears in a Brit reality TV series, Made in Chelsea.

Cops at L.A. International Airport arrested actor Edward Furlong on suspicion of domestic violence after an incident at the airport Monday, the A.P. reports.

Police didn't identify the object of Furlong's alleged ire. What is known is that officers busted the star of Terminator 2 and American History X and took him into custody after being summoned to an arrival area. He was booked on suspicion of felony domestic violence involving a spouse or girlfriend. Furlong is separated from his wife Rachael Kneeland; a divorce is pending.

Furlong, 35, is being held on $50,000 bail. His publicist R.J. Rousso did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner reminded us in Requiem for a Nun.

Certainly, heirs don't think so. His literary estate is suing Sony Pictures Classics for paraphrasing the line in Woody Allen's 2011 film, Midnight in Paris, the Associated Press reports.

The estate is also suing Northrop Grumman Corp. and the Washington Post Co. for allegedly helping themselves to another Faulkner quotation in a newspaper ad.

The first lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Oxford, Miss., claims copyright infringement for Owen Wilson's misquote of the line: "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past."

The second lawsuit, filed Friday in Jackson, Miss., makes similar claims about the ad, which used a passage from a 1956 essay Faulkner wrote in Harper's Magazine, AP reports. The ad said, in part, "We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."

Sony says the quote is "fair use," a legal term meaning the user doesn't have to license or pay for it, according to AP. "This is a frivolous lawsuit and we are confident we will prevail in defending it," a Sony Pictures spokeswoman said.