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.

• Uh-oh! Brian Singer’s Tom Cruise-tries-to-kill-Hitler-with-an-eye patch drama Valkyrie has been pushed from prestige season to dumping season. The already much-mocked film was previously pushed down the pipe from July to October 2008; with re-shoots still looming, it’ll now open in February 2009.
• Benderspink, the agency that packaged Juno, has a new gambit for luring teen girls to the multiplex: they’re producing “a hip-hop musical reimagining” of Jane Austen’s Emma.
• Cloverfield is a huge hit in Japan. This is the surest sign I can think of that global-political cycle of the 20th century is complete.

• How to craft a Variety box office trend story: line up your greatest hits of disingenuous statements from past stories (Juno–the little movie that could! Cloverfield dropped 68% in its second weekend, but that’s not so bad–even if it was really 72%!); find either wildly optimistic or severely apocalyptic structuring rubric to make these old chestnuts seem, uh, less old; repeat.
• Speaking of Cloverfield, Paramount, apparently turning a blind eye to the film’s lack of staying power, has offered director Matt Reeves two new jobs, including a Cloverfield sequel. He’ll also direct The Invisible Woman, “a Hitchcock-style thriller that probes the mind of a former beauty queen who turns to a life of crime to protect her family,” from his own script.
• Paul Haggis is setting up a production shingle at Tom Cruise’s Scientology rec center studio, United Artists.

We’ve made several updates to our Sundance 2008 Deal chart over the past 24 hours. The most significant news is that the Weinsteins have acquired the doc Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired for theatrical distribution in every territory *except* for the U.S. and Canada. I saw the film this morning and will have more to say about it later today, but suffice it to say for now that the film casts a very, um, “European” eye on Polanski’s child rape scandal, poking quite a bit of fun at American attitudes towards sex and media and, especially, our justice system.

Also of note: United Artists has bought the remake rights to Timecrimes, a Spanish sci-fi film premiering here before hitting theaters under the auspices of Magnolia, as well as the excuse for a raging karaoke party in Park City last night (anything you may have heard about your blogger’s Fred Schneider impression has been grossly exaggerated.) Finally, Celluloid Dreams has signed a deal to rep Lance Hammer’s Ballast for international sale. I hope to see Ballast later today–it wasn’t on my original schedule, but after a colleague described it as “The Dardennes on the Mississippi Delta,” I’m intrigued.

Check out the full list of Sundance 2008 deals here.

United Hollywood passes along the news that, mere hours after making a side deal with the WGA that will allow them to legally employ writers, United Artists has made a tentative deal with Paul Haggis to adapt a children’s fantasy book series called Ranger’s Apprentice. United Artists was the first studio to make such a deal (although Lionsgate and the Weinsteins reportedly have similar pacts in the works), so I guess this makes Paul Haggis the first screenwriter to legally get a job in the midst of the strike.

It’s legal, but is it kosher? An interesting fight has broken out in the comments on the United Hollywood post. On the one hand, this looks like a victory for these WGA side deals: the first studio to put a pact together nabs a name brand screenwriter and puts him to work on a franchise film within a matter of hours. But the very quickness of the deal has some wondering: was Haggis doing more than picketing over the past ten weeks?

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• As of this writing, no official statement has been released, but the WGA has allegedly made a Worldwide Pants-esque pact with United Artists, which will allow the Tom Cruise-topped studio to employ screenwriters for the duration of the strike.
• In more strike news: if NBC telecasts the Golden Globes, the WGA will picket and members of SAG––ie: stars––will not show up. So the HFPA is hoping NBC will back away and allow them to go on with the show as a private, non-televised party.
• Pamela McClintock opens her mainstream box office report by peddling the “Juno is a crossover hit” spin yet again; the same film is named in the fourth paragraph of the specialty report as the co-leader of a “B.O. surge in the specialty marketplace.” The news–and it is actually news–that There Will Be Blood made $26,216 on each of its 51 screens is relegated to graph 5.
• Speaking of: the National Society of Film Critics has named There Will Be Blood as their top film of 2007.

• The writers and the studios have lifted the press blackout on strike talks just long enough to reveal that negotiations have hit a wall, after the studios offered a deal worth “$130 million in additional compensation to scribes over three years,” and the scribes kindly asked them to suck it. In fact, according to Variety, the WGA asked for a four day moratorium to think it over, and then went to the press with a “point-by-point deconstruction of the deal points only hours after adjourning.” Talks are still scheduled to resume on Tuesday, but there are rumors that the AMPTP has about had it with the writers, and may soon switch gears to focus on hammering out a deal with the DGA.
• Variety and The Hollywood Reporter breath a collective sigh of relief over the news that yes, there will be stars at Sundance after all.
• Lions For Lambs cost $35 million to make, and is expected to barely clear $20 million domestically. Not the best start for Tom Cruise’s revamped United Artists. Cruise’s partner Paula Wagner spins it like this: “You have to look at us as a start-up company. We had zero assets. The cupboard was bare. Now we have one movie in our library, a movie we are very proud of.”
• With only one film opening in wide release this weekend, Enchanted is expected to stay on top of the box office.

• “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. 

As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is mostly unsuccessful, but as a statement of purpose on behalf of its co-star and executive producer, Tom Cruise, it’s mildly fascinating. Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him.

You probably don’t need to be reminded that Cruise has had a rough couple of years, culminating in the announcement in November 2006 that he and long-time producing partner Paula Wagner had signed a deal to resurrect MGM’s dormant United Artists. Some saw this as a savvy move for both Cruise and MGM: disappointing box office on Mission Impossible: 3 aside, there’s still no one on the planet with Cruise’s international name-and-face recognition, and as he proved with War of the Worlds, which made $65 million in its first weekend just a scant month after the couch jumping incident, the guy can open the right project regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. But skeptics (myself included) wondered if MGM was just throwing Cruise a bone—if they weren’t doing anything with UA anyway, was handing the brand over really a sure sign of confidence?

The guy had—has–something to prove. With his career at the crossroads, the choice of Lions For Lambs as the vehicle to drive him over the hump is not an immediately logical one. It’s worth noting that Cruise didn’t go looking for politically relevant story to tell—Redford signed on to direct the script, and then called Cruise, looking to cast him. And I may get permanently disinvited from Sundance for saying this, but I’m not sure if Redford fully knew what he was getting into.

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• Lions For Lambs is, according to Dade Hayes, a “remarkably strident political work that takes dead aim at the Bush White House and assails post-9/11 foreign policy.” It’s also the first project to see release from the Tom Cruise-controlled United Artists, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Cruise’s comeback is riding on its success. And yet, it seems as though Cruise the producer hasn’t given Cruise the star (who plays a right-wing senator in Lambs) talking points on how to package his own political views in relation to the film.
• Ryan Gosling gained 20 pounds and grew a beard for the job, and yet, a day before shooting was to begin, he was fired from Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and replaced with Mark Wahlberg. Who wants to put money on what “creative differences” actually means in this case?
• Graphic novel adaptation 30 Days of Night barely squeaked past Why Did I Get Married? at the box office this weekend, earning $16 million to Tyler Perry’s $12 million. Michael Clayton, which has already been written off as a failure by some Clooney haters, held on to the fourth place slot for the second week in a row. Star-studded Oscar bait continued to bomb pretty hard: Rendition opened wide in ninth place, and Reservation Road managed just $2,630 per screen in limited release.

• With a total gross of $140,000, The Darjeeling Limited earned the highest per-screen average of the year this weekend, when it opened in two theaters on New York on Saturday after opening the New York Film Festival on Friday night. Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution opened almost as strong: the NC-17 rated, 158 minute film grossed almost $62,000 in its single New York engagement.
• Admittedly, there’s a lot riding on the success of Lions For Lambs (it’s the first production to be released by Tom Cruise’s revamped United Artists, and Cruise’s first starring role since the disappointing Mission Impossible 3), but is YouTube really the best place to sell an Oscar-bait drama about war and moral responsibility? Cruise and Co. think so: they’ve signed a deal with GooTube “in an effort to build buzz for the drama…to launch a competish for which individuals can produce a 90-second video discussing the social issue they’re most passionate about.”
• Amidst recent accusations that they’re just not very good at releasing films, First Look has announced two new acquisitions: Day Zero, a draft drama starring Elijah Wood which premiered at Tribeca earlier this year; and The Amateurs, a comedy about a crew of middle-aged suburbanites who hop into the world of DIY pornography.
• Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers took the top prize this weekend from Paul Auster’s jury at the San Sebastian Film Festival.