The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Fox is out with a new trailer for the Ben Stiller-directed The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, and who wouldn’t have wanted to be a fly on the wall when the studio reached out to Warner Bros for permission to use its signature iconic Life Magazine?

I’m told it came down to a couple of phone calls directly from the amiable Fox film chief Jim Gianopulos, as the magazine division was under the same roof when rights cleared. It sounds like Warner Bros was much more accommodating to its fellow major studio than it was to The Weinstein Company when the latter tried to release The Butler and was halted in its tracks because Warner Bros protected its stake in an equally defunct property, the black-and-white, silent short film from 1916. Now even though Fox sued Warner Bros and won a big settlement over a rights dispute on Watchmen, they still managed to come together here to give Stiller a nostalgic context for the redo of the daydreaming wannabe hero. Here’s the newest Mitty trailer