The most terrifying words in the Hollywood lexicon, apart from “slow opening weekend”, are “spoiler alert”. This is a bloody sport of amateur one-upmanship in the era of the camera-phone, the hyperactive blogger and those nuts who tried to hack into the Transformers set computers no fewer than 7,000 times last year. Less effort is made easing world hunger.

Fudgy snaps can ruin a film’s reputation months before it opens. The threat of plot-spoilers kept Steven Spielberg awake while polishing his crystal skulls, irritated JK Rowling as American papers gave away Deathly Hallows details, and provoked the geeks of Lost to film three different actors embalmed in a coffin for the final Big Reveal of the current season.

The heaviest hand has been laid on would-be paparazzi in New Orleans, where Brad Pitt has just finished shooting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which he is born old but grows more golden every day. Others might just call that living with Angelina Jolie. Dozens of the city’s police were deployed to enforce antique antiloitering laws against anyone spotted with a lens - including tourists. Murders, meanwhile, went on at their usual pace.

This weekend, JRR Tolkien’s family should know the date they go into legal battle against New Line. The Warner Brothers-owned studio grossed $6 billion from The Lord of the Rings and yet, according to Hollywood’s voodoo accountants, still failed to make any profit to split with the Tolkiens.

To nonlegal eyes, the case favours the Tolkiens. But there is a wild card to be played – Christopher Carrie, who claims he was molested as a boy in a Birmingham church by Tolkien’s oldest son, Father John Tolkien, a scoutmaster, who denied it all before his death in 2003.

This week, Carrie is in LA after meeting John Schulman, top lawyer at New Line-Warner Bros, about turning his religious encounters into a movie. If this were a Hollywood fantasy movie, of course, the evil studio bosses would merely leak the prospect of a film in a newspaper diary, and the clan would slink away like Gollum. But they didn’t, and $160m is at stake. So expect it to get orcish, with some big, scary lawyers on the warpath.

An agents’ poll revealed the most eagerly anticipated movie of the summer is the new Batman, The Dark Knight, with Pixar’s Wall-E a close second. The buzz suggests Heath Ledger could be the first posthumous Oscar-winner since Peter Finch, for Network, in 1976.

And the most anticipated new television shows? Out of 70 in the works this summer, the top five are those from the pens of Buffy creator Joss Whedon and Lost’s JJ Abrams, the revived Beverly Hills 90210, and two remakes of Brit hits - Life on Mars, with Dubliners Jason O’Mara as Sam and Colm Meaney as Gene Hunt, and Eleventh Hour, with Rufus Sewell replacing Patrick Stewart.

One can only hope they are smarter adaptations than NBC’s horrible Coupling. Its bruised creator, Steven Moffat, now the finest purveyor of Doctor Who yarns, had to be “love-bombed” by Spielberg before he would write Tintin for him. The director pledged to shield him from the more obnoxious Hollywood suits and habits, calling it a “no hassle guarantee”. Now that is a perk.

Richard Brooks is away

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