Since he first stepped into the solo spotlight, Justin Timberlake has been Hollywood's prince in waiting, just one perfect role away from claiming his crown as the biggest star in the world forever. Now he has found that part.

It's a day to bring back the old in Hollywood: last week's TV shows, yesterday's stores and TV stars from a decade ago are lining up for their reboots. If they can make Batman fresh, why not Chandler?

Remember when sci-fi movies were about blowing up aliens and attacking Godzilla? Those days are gone, my friend. Thanks to Battlestar Galactica and District 9, the genre now exists to please the intelligentsia. The latest victim, the Star Trek sequel.

So the weekend box office numbers are in and they've confirmed something I'd already suspected: I'm the only upright-walking mammal with at least twelve dollars of disposable income who hasn't seen Star Trek.

Chopping Block gets chopped, J.J. Abrams gets extended, and Ricky Gervais' next film will be unlike anything he's ever done before except for The Office.

Transformers returns. Again. Movies will be produced, WGA employees will be let go, Allen Ginsberg and Confucius will be resurrected, as will a young John Lennon. And Catherine Hardwicke makes another kiddie movie.

Reality Bites: We've been agitating for a while to get an image of Winona Ryder donning her Vulcan ears as Spock's mom for J.J. Abrams's new film Star Trek: Underwear, and thanks to /film's helpful selection of big still frames from the trailer, we got what we wanted — almost. Yes, that's the first image of Ryder in character, but the "babuschka chic" look covers her...wait, what's that? Spock's mom is human, not Vulcan? Then we have no earthly explanation for how the 37-year-old Ryder apparently popped out Spock's portrayer, 31-year-old Zachary Quinto, at age six. [/film]

The first real trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot emerged in theaters last Friday, spilling a dark, sprawling shadow over the Bond film that followed it and confirming our suspicions that about .003% of its rumored $200 million budget went to anything resembling a screenplay. Like we care: Our audience tuned out every platitude and ultimatum that followed the introduction of young troublemaker James Tiberius Kirk, lapsing into an effects coma from which we're only beginning to emerge this morning. Paramount will have an official HD trailer online later today, but in the meantime, bask in the bootlegged bombast available now: Monsters! Sex! Simon Pegg! And a pissed-off Spock who puts those uncanny Katie Holmes comparisons to rest in seconds flat, thank God. [YouTube]

Behold, your first look at J.J. Abrams's vision of the Enterprise for the upcoming Star Trek—both incredibly familiar, and yet...totally familiar. But that's intentional, says he: "If you're going to do the Enterprise, it better look like the Enterprise, because otherwise, what are you doing?" It certainly hews closer to the original than its bridge does, already derailed by purists as far too Apple Store Genius Bar-y to adequately photon torpedo Klingons. (See how down with the mythology we are?) We get more of a Famima! checkout counter vibe from it, however, which is fine with us. Set a course for Char Siew Pork Steamy Buns! Mmmmm... (Click for full-size view.) [EW]

Just when we'd managed to shake our uncontrollable addiction to Lostpedia, brand-new footage from the upcoming Season 5 of Lost has hit the internet. What do we learn (after an interminable recap of previous storylines) about the island hijinks we'll be seeing come January 2009? Sayid gets a gun! Hurley gets a gun! Kate gets a gun! Probably even the baby gets a gun! As is par for the course with Lost, the footage only raises new questions; specifically, where is the return of Michelle Rodriguez (and her vibrator)? And, perhaps most importantly, is Jack's missing chest hair still in the clutches of the smoke monster? [The Lost Vault]

Yesterday, we spent time dissecting Entertainment Weekly's new cover devoted to the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek, starring a Marfan's-afflicted Katie Holmes and the president of Pi Kapp. Today, even more images were released for the film, which comes out next summer but is being heavily promoted now, in October, because the strike-wary studios have fuck-all for you until next year. Let's have a look, shall we?

Today, Entertainment Weekly released images from its upcoming issue devoted to J.J. Abrams's reboot of Star Trek, and featured on the cover were the two clearest looks yet at Zachary Quinto as Spock and Chris Pine as Kirk (what, were Tyler Perry and Winona Ryder busy?). Heroes star Quinto has seemed like a natural to don Leonard Nimoy's ears ever since the casting was announced, but we must admit that this cover gave us pause. Is it the amped-up drag queen eyebrows? Or is it that Quinto, with his severe bob and vacant expression, resembles a Marfan's-afflicted Katie Holmes? Let's do a side-by-side:

Despite the likelihood of William Shatner enlisting his daughter for an aggrieved response as we write this, it is with some certainty that we report the official end of hostilities between the original Captain Kirk and the man rebooting the Star Trek franchise without him, J.J. Abrams. In a new interview, even Abrams himself appears to have had little idea that their putative feud had escalated to "DVD-extra" levels of multimedia debate, but such is the fury of a Shat scorned. For the last time, follow the jump for Abrams's earnest defense and our brief, ceremonial farewell to the whole sad mess.Click to view Frankly, we're much more intrigued by the filmmaker's indirect swipe at bloated blockbuster contemporaries like The Dark Knight and Watchmen ("I’m sick of these two hours and forty-five minute movies. Seriously, it’s like I don’t have enough time to stay two hours and forty-five minutes. I’m exhausted just saying that twice. I can’t stand it.”) and the revelation that cast member Simon Pegg allegedly cried when Abrams showed him rough footage from the film. Short-and-moving sells us every time — which, again, is not Mr. Shatner's cue to return to his Webcam for an affected! Appeal! For help! In the trenchant words of Ringo Starr: Peace and love, Bill, but leave us alone now.

If you want William Shatner in your little movie, respect that he is the greatest actor in Hollywood and the most important thing since movable type and give the man a real freaking role! Director J.J. Abrams learned that the hard way when he tried to squeeze the living legend into some bit cameo part in his upcoming Star Trek remake. Abrams agrees with Shatner that he's too much man for a walk-on in any Star Trek project, but he just couldn't make something bigger happen for the original James Tiberius Kirk. "It was very tricky," Abrams told the L.A. Times. "We actually had written a scene with him in it that was a flashback kind of thing, but the truth is, it didn't quite feel right. The bigger thing was that he was very vocal that he didn't want to do a cameo. We tried desperately to put him in the movie, but he was making it very clear that he wanted the movie to focus on him significantly, which, frankly, he deserves." The director was responding to an earlier comment Shatner had made about the newest Star Trek offering: "There is no need for me to know anything because I'm not a part of it." [UPI]

By now you're well aware that William "Bill" Shatner has not been written into J.J. Abrams's Star Trek movie, an egregious cast omission all but certain to sink this latest Enterprise before it even manages to nudge itself off its launching dock. But the fact of the matter is that he isn't, and while we seem to have come to terms with it, Shatner has not. It has thus evolved into precisely the kind of nerd-slight that gets bounced to and fro on the internets for us to stand by and watch like some interminable Pong game, just with less suspense or investment in the outcome. The latest chapter sucks Shatner's daughter Liz into the proceedings—surprisingly normal-looking considering she was the product of a one-beam-stand with a hot little green number from Orion—in which they both clear the record. Bill was not, we repeat not, approached to appear in Star Trek, J.J. Won't you reconsider? No? OK.

Though J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot has been bumped from this winter to next May, Paramount has released a new sheaf of official character posters to keep the slim-pickings teaser trailer company. And what posters they are: why, who wouldn't recognize the younger versions of... um, whoever that's supposed to be... and, uh, Bones? Wait, and that ten-year-old kid is Chekov? Set our phasers on stunned.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our millions of Defamer operatives. We'd like to remind you that this feature is powered by you, so if you want to see more installments of PrivacyWatch, then all you've got to do is to send us your sightings. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line so we don't lose them) and tell everyone about the time you saw some girl "all over" David Spade at the movies.

What fun it must be to have a baby, get married, or turn one year older if you’re lucky enough to be chummy with Village People Fan Club president Tom Cruise. As a card-carrying member of Tom’s inner circle of disco-dancing Xenu-fearing tribe of pals, new mom Nicole Kidman had the joy of receiving one of Cruise’s trademark lavish gifts — as People reports, the birth of little Sunday Urban prompted Nicole’s ex-partner in bearded crime to send over a huge “high-end” gift basket filled to the brim with fancy baby must-haves. But after reviewing Tom’s history of gifting his nearest and dearest with incredibly bizarre and, at times, inappropriate items, we suspect his inclusion of “Giraffe baby blankets” might actually be a subtle swipe at Kidman’s tendency to resemble the long-necked drowsy animal. Cruise’s unnerving presents of the past to fellow Tom-ophiles like Dakota Fanning and Katie Holmes, after the jump.

In a story from the NY Times that's almost too unbelievable to be true, a married couple of Wall Street investors—quite possibly the coolest eccentric rich parents currently living in America—had their Upper East Side residence custom retrofitted by a brilliant designer to hold more secret compartments, puzzles, games, and hidden treasures than Hogwarts Academy, all to delight their four young children. Beyond that, the apartment "even comes with its own book"— which Everything Is Illuminated author Jonathan Safran Foer was approached to compose (but turned down)—and its own soundtrack. Browsing the slide show tour is as mindblowing as it is mindbending, which, we suppose, makes it somehow fitting that Paramount has purchased the article for J.J. Abrams to adapt into a feature film:

Remember that magical mystery puzzle-house that the New York Times wrote about a while back? Basically these crazy rich people hired a designer named Eric Clough to "do" their new Fifth Avenue apartment and, as a fun thing for the crazy rich people and their kids, he turned the whole house into a scavenger hunt/puzzle kind of thing. Hidden clues and compartments and messages and all that. It's a pretty cool story! So cool, in fact, that J.J. Abrams, the man behind Felicity, Alias, and sort-of Lost, is producing a movie based on the Times piece. How fun for the crazy rich people. Not only do they get to live in a whimsical puzzle-mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, they get to have a movie made about them too! Of course there will be a more magical element to the movie than the non-fiction Times article, with doors leading to other realms and whatnot. Because that's never been done before! Other fantasy elements in the movie will include the kids growing up to not be spoiled little shits and the puzzle-house, with all its secret compartments, not becoming a frustrating nuisance a few months after the puzzle has been solved.