Author Neil Gaiman will not be involved with the “Silent Hill” sequel script.

Like father like son, Harry Osborn, played by actor James Franco, will be meaner and nastier than his dad, the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) in the next installment of Spiderman (Spiderman 3), which is reportedly the last for Tobey Maquire.

Brittany Murphy, (Sin City, Happy Feet) will provide the cutsie voice for the title character in the upcoming Disney animated straight-to-DVD “Tinker Bell” tale. “When they asked me to play the role of Tinker Bell, come on!” Murphy said enthusiastically in an interview while promoting her upcoming film, the indie drama The Dead Girl. “How could I possibly say no? Disney sent me a basket. I’ll never forget; I was working on a movie in London, and they sent me a basket with Tinker Bell alarm clocks and things like that and this great sketch of what she’d look like, along with all the other characters in Pixie Hollow.”

2006 was an all-around good year for filmmakers and studios despite some lackluster B.O. from a couple of big-budget movies that cost a lot and grossed little by comparison. Overall receipts are up around 8% over 2005’s end-of-year tally. Flicks considered mid-range budget flicks, like “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Borat” were the real winners by far. Also, once again the animated features ruled the box-office when compared dollar for dollar.

2007 Tournament of Roses Parade Grand Marshall George Lucas and 200 of the Empire’s finest stormstroopers will headline this year’s annual street gig in Pasadena, California.

Marmaduke Hussey, who spent a decade as chairman of the BBC, positioning the famous network for the digital-age, died this week. He was 83.

Thank goodness the “Black Christmas” remake turned out to be a lump of coal in the Dimension Films stocking. We hope they learned their lesson. It was junk in 1974 and it still is junk in 2006.

The Walt Disney Co’s studio division generated $3.26 billion in global box office revenue in 2006 and claimed the year’s top two box office and top three DVD domestic releases for the first time — “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” “Cars” and “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

Finally, we want to close out this final brief with a Happy Birthday wish to the Grand Lady of Star Trek — Nichelle Nichols. Many, many more!

Happy New Year to all of you from all of us at Slice of SciFi!