These entertainment magazines have Star Wars fever

“Star Wars,” Hollywood’s make-or-break year-end franchise, returns next week with “The Last Jedi” — and will, no doubt, pull in $900 million or thereabouts from US moviegoers and become the talk of Greater Nerdistan later this month.

Ahead of the eighth installment of the nine-part George Lucas fantasy on Dec. 15, the media marketing machine is in full roar.

Time Inc.’s Entertainment Weekly devotes 10 pages and four different covers to tell the “Untold Story” of the film in a pedal-to-the-metal effort to give fanboys a satisfying fix before they dress up as their favorite character and line up for opening-night tickets.

Wenner Media’s Rolling Stone, not to be outdone, serves up a “Jedi Confidential” — a seven-page extravaganza woven from interviews with seven actors and directors (including J.J. “Force Awakens” Abrams).

While both magazines put out strong, effective efforts, we think Rolling Stone is the better choice this week. It seems to be written for adult fans while EW sets its sights on bright-eyed middle-schoolers.

For example, Mark Hamill, in talking with EW’s Anthony Breznican about his emotional on-again, off-again relationship with pal and co-star Carrie Fisher, who died last year, says that once they would see each other the harsh feeling from the fights would melt away — and the sentence trails off in an ellipsis.

EW’s editors felt it necessary to add: “He doesn’t finish the sentence, but you know what he means.” D’oh.

Rolling Stone’s senior writer Brian Hiatt paints a more complete picture of the actors in the film and their personal and character’s issues with writer-director Rian Johnson.

While we don’t believe for a second the actors’ words are anything but, you know, acting, it still makes for an interesting read.

Both titles’ stories describe how the film’s Millennium Falcon had this mysterious power over folks on the set.

Hamill, when he got to the cockpit of the Falcon, asked for a moment to be by himself as he was nearly brought to tears, EW reports.

Johnson, too, admits that shooting scenes on the Falcon “nearly brought him to tears,” RS says.

Niger deaths echo in troop scoop

Time serves up an eye-opening cover report on how the US government is relying too heavily on the military’s most elite fighters, because they offer political cover for leaders who want to avoid the optics of deploying troops overseas.

Special operations insiders, according to Time’s W.J. Hennigan, say they have become an “easy button for successive administrations to push — an alternative to sending thousands of conventional military forces to hot spots and risking the political blowback that comes with it.”

Hennigan’s pack-busting reporting also pulls back the curtain on the roiling controversy over the four US commandos killed on Oct. 4 in Niger. This year, 11 special ops members have been killed in four countries.

Speaking of political cover, two of President Trump’s three lawyers — Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow — who are charged with handling questions from Special Counsel Robert Mueller are interviewed in the New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin.

Toobin breaks down how and why Trump might be facing legal jeopardy in light of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s Dec. 1 plea deal and how Trump’s legal advisers are building a defense.

Sekulow tells Toobin that even if collusion between Trump and the Russians took place it wouldn’t be illegal.

“There is not a statute called collusion,” Sekulow said while Cobb insists that Flynn’s guilty plea — lying to the FBI about meeting with Russia’s UN envoy — “only implicates” Flynn.

Sure, but the tale Flynn might tell Mueller. That could be a different story.