• Paula Wagner, Tom Cruise’s long-time producing partner, is leaving her post at the top of United Artists. Though Wagner will hold on to a share of UA––which has barely made use of their $500 million credit line, due to some friction with parent studio MGM over which movies to greenlight––apparently “it’s possible that the studio will once again go into hibernation and that the UA coin will go to MGM.”
• Totally coincidentally, the release date on UA’s next big production, the bad buzz-plagued Tom Cruise-in-an-eye patch vehicle Valkyrie, has been moved to Dec. 26 from Feb. 13, allegedly to capitalize on holiday audiences.
• In news that has to do with Cruise but is totally unrelated to Paula Wagner, he might star in The Tourist, a remake of a 2005 French film called Anthony Zimmer, with an adaptation by Julian Fellowes.
• Magnolia is funneling a few of genre-arm Magnet’s recent acquisitions into a theatrical release label called the Six Shooter Film Series. The Series will start with the Tribeca-lauded Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In, and will also showcase Sundance picks Special and Timecrimes.

I know I should be able to pull off some kind of stunning analysis of this morning’s New York Times story, in which Tom Cruise’s producing partner Paula Wagner defends United Artists against the bad buzz swirling around Valkyrie, but I’m not feeling it. The story just adheres to such a tired formula: “The Internet says there’s trouble, but I talked to a studio exec for an hour and a half and she said everything was okay! And Bram Stoker’s Dracula made $83 million! So take that, Internet!” Yawn. Plus, the timing of the piece just seems bizarre. It’s been ages (in internet time, at least) since Valkyrie’s release date was pushed back to February 2009. Cruise is getting good press for his cameo in Tropic Thunder. Why would UA jump to defend themselves now? Why not just let Bryan Singer shoot (or reshoot) whatever he needs to shoot, and project confidence about the film and the release date through non-defensive silence?

Whatever. I’ll just point you towards David Poland’s piece on the piece, which begins as a clarification of the statement “Valkyrie is dead,” which was quoted from Poland’s blog in the second sentence of the NYT piece without much context. Mostly, he’s annoyed at being lumped into a story in which Roger Friedman is heavily quoted. “I just wanted to say, I would never make any of the silly, lazy reaches that The Inhuman Stain would. They are unfair and uninformed. But then again, what do you expect from a gossip columinst who works for a right-wing organization that stands against much of what he stands for and who “reports” what he is told to report?”

But it could be worse. “At least [NYT's Michael] Cieply didn’t call me ‘a blogger,’” Poland writes. On his blog.

• “In theory,” writes Adam Dawtrey in Variety, script scribes based in the UK are “still free to work on movies backed by the U.S. studios,” WGA strike be damned. Meanwhile, the WGA is adamant that they won’t return to the bargaining table until the studios respond to the last proposal left on the table when talks broke down on Sunday.
• “UA faces a daunting challenge in managing expectations and trying to educate the public and consumer press that box office grosses aren’t what United Artists is about; rather, Cruise and Wagner want to continue the company’s legacy of nurturing talent and creativity.” Variety looks at how the resurrected studio is struggling to position itself in the marketplace.
• Twelve films are eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, including Beowulf, TMNT, Persepolis, The Simpsons and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.