Thursday night Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that Ben Stiller will probably play the lead role in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a film based on a 1939 James Thurber short story that first appeared in The New Yorker.

The 20th Century Fox project has been kicking around forever, but a new script by Steve Conrad , writer of The Pursuit of Happyness, persuaded Stiller to sign on, and now a director is being sought for a late-fall start.

I haven’t read Conrad’s script and that would be the whole thing, of course. But a film about a guy who lives half his life in a fantasy-daydream realm? That sounds a bit so-whatty. With all the dream-supply technology available today, what less-than-fully-fulfilled person in 2011 isn’t living in some kind of alt.reality? In 1939 James Thurber‘s story might have been up to something a little bit brave and unusual and perhaps even subversive, but today….? Daydreams, fantasies and inner realms are the norm, the national religion.

Plus there’s that title, or, more to the point, the name “Walter Mitty.” It sounds musty, anachronistic — an invented name meant to convey dweebiness, like Herman J. Beedle or Chester P. Finklestein. What under-40 guy is named Walter? It’s one of those pre-war cobweb attic-storage names like Ethel or Mildred or Milton. The piece would be freed of a lot of baggage without it.

Hop dropped 44% from last weekend but is still the weekend’s #1 performer. Hanna performed decently but how will Joe and Jane Popcorn respond to its arty fantasia chops later this week and next weekend? Your Highness and Arthur are the weekend’s big shortfallers with Soul Surfer doing only so-so.

Hop did $5.5 million yesterday at 3616 situations, and will finish Sunday night with an estimated $21 million.

Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino is estimating that Arthur will earn $12.7 million for the weekend. It did $4.5 million yesterday in 2276 theatres. That’s definitely low with weekend estimates forecasting $15 to $17 million.

Hanna is third, off to a reasonably good start with a projected $12.2 million for weekend on 2535 screens or situations. The difference between Arthur and Hanna is that the latter is a really good film — very assured, high style, an art thriller. Contrino claims it’s “one or two action scenes shy of satisfying a bigger crowd…I just don’t see Joe and Jane going for it all that strongly.”

Soul Surfer did $3.65 million on 2214 screens, and is expected to bring in just over $10 million by weekend’s end.

Your Highness came in fifth, earning $3.8 million in 2769 situations with $10.5 million due by by Sunday night. You’d think that a film with Danny McBride, Natalie Portman and James Franco would have done better. Universal has a yen for 18-to-34 fanboys — this, Paul, Scott Pilgrim. Except fanboy audiences are limited (especially when the movie sucks) and only take the box-office so far.

Last night Variety‘s Jeff Sneider reported that The Hangover Part II director Todd Phillips has cut Liam Neeson‘s cameo (i.e., the one that Mel Gibson was going to play until the cast revolted) because the scene had to be rewritten, and so he re-shot it with Nick Cassevetes because Neeson was in London shooting Clash of the Titans 2…another paycheck.

I’ve read the story three times and don’t understand what the big deal is. People who passed it along were saying”uh-oh,” “this one looks sticky” and so on. Maybe…but the only problem with this film (Warner Bros., 5.26), I’m told, is that it’s just a Bangkok version of the first one.

The great Sidney Lumet — a gifted and tenacious explorer of urban crime-and-punishment realms, and easily the most New York City-steeped director of the 20th and early 21st Century — died this morning in Manhattan at age 86. This is a tough one for me. All my adult life I’ve felt a special kinship with Lumet, who not only understood good gritty drama but especially (given my New Jersey, Connecticut and Manhattan background) what it is to grapple with and bathe in New York City moods, currents, aromas and atmospheres.

Sidney Lumet on set of Dog Day Afternoon with Al Pacino.

Armond White used to trash Lumet, but what a boxer he was! A fast shooter who portrayed the moralistic urban landscape like few others, and what a great finale to a long and storied career that two of Lumet’s best films — Find Me Guilty and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead — were his last two, released in ’06 and ’07 when he was 82 and 83.

What can you say about a guy who directed 12 Angry Men (’57), The Fugitive Kind (’59), A View From The Bridge (’61), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (’62), The Pawnbroker (’63), Fail-Safe (’64 — eclipsed by Dr. Strangelove but certainly an above-average nuclear-war thriller), Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (’70 — noteworthy for including the first unmistakable off-screen blowjob in motion picture history, and an inter-racial one at that), Serpico (’73 — a legendary Al Pacino performance in Lumet’s first seriously-steeped-in-New York’s-law-and-order-culture film), Dog Day Afternoon (’75), Network (’76), Just Tell me What You Want (’80 — a personal guilty pleasure), Prince of the City (’81), The Verdict (’82), The Morning After (’86), Q & A (’90 — a memorable scuzzy-grizzled Nick Nolte performance), Find Me Guilty and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead.

Michael Caine, Lumet, Treat Williams — sometime around ’81 or thereabouts.

The late ’50s and early ’60s were Lumet’s break-out years, and then he really roared into his prime in the ’70s and early ’80s — five classics in an eight-year period. He held on with distinction in the late ’80s and early ’90s, kind of went into a slumber mode for a decade or so and then flared back into action with his final two films.

To me Lumet’s masterpiece is Prince of the City (’81) — a nearly three-hour-long drama about the morality of finking out your friends in order to find your morality, and entirely about New York cops and mob guys and district attorneys and junkies, most of it set in the offices of this or that prosecutor with guys dressed in suits and shirtsleeves with cold takeout food and tepid coffee on the desk. For 30 years I’ve worshipped and fed off memories of Jerry Orbach ‘s performance as Gus Levy in that film.

Here’s a Lumet interview I did in Toronto four years ago, primarily discussing Devil but also Guilty.

Lumet, Marlon Brando on the set of The Fugitive Kind (’60).