No matter what problems Bryan Singer and Tom Cruise‘s Valkyrie may be grappling with, there is nothing worse than postponing a major film’s release date for the second time and, as MGM and United Artists announced this morning, pushing the opening from October 3rd to February 13th.
I’m sorry to say this but today’s announcement was tantamount to throwing in the towel. MGM and UA have more or less said to the world, “This movie has problems so insurmountable that they can’t be fixed even over the next six and a half to seven months…even with the benefits of extra shooting, even with the opportunity to constantly tweak and refine and even write and shoot an extra scene or two…this film is so not working that the only thing we can do is give it a dump release in mid-February.”
Things may not be as bad as this. I haven’t seen the film. It could be an okay or so-so thing. The point is that MGM and UA have convinced everyone that they’ve got a real stinker on their hands, or something dangerously close to that. They should have stuck to the October release date, come hell or high water.
I’m not saying I agree with any of the smart cracks that have been passed around today, but a smart director-writer wrote me earlier today with the following: “I just heard someone refer to Valkyrie as “Tom Cruise’s The Day The Clown Cried.”