Marketing
Valkyrie was intended to be a high-profile film that would jump-start United Artists, the host studio partly owned by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner. Pressure was placed on Valkyrie to do well since an earlier United Artists film featuring Cruise, Lions for Lambs, performed poorly in the box office, and the studio's planned production of Oliver Stone's Pinkville was canceled. The film changed release dates multiple times. It was originally slated to be released on August 8, 2008, then moved up earlier to June 27, 2008. The film was then held off to October 3, 2008 to avoid competition from WALL-E and Wanted, and to enable the late filming of the North African battle sequence. The October date was also originally chosen to increase the film's chances of awards success. In April 2008, the release date was pushed back to February 13, 2009, with the studio citing the early fall schedule as too crowded with Academy Award prospects. Valkyrie would have taken advantage of the lucrative President's Day weekend, after The Wolfman and The Pink Panther 2 were moved from this date.
In July 2008, United Artists president of worldwide marketing Dennis Rice was replaced by Michael Vollman, who was tasked to develop a marketing strategy for the "troubled" Valkyrie, which had been "battered by constant media sniping". Under Vollman, by August 2008, the release date was changed to December 26, 2008 with reports citing commercial reasons for the move after a successful test screening. (The film was ultimately released on Christmas Day, December 25, 2008.) The release date was before the end of December, which "crucially" helped the film with a home distribution deal with the subscription channel Showtime. In the same month of August, Paula Wagner left her position with the studio during the film's post-production. The changing release date for Valkyrie drew criticism about the viability of United Artists, and the studio aimed to combat the criticism leading up to the film's eventual release. In addition, the first theatrical trailer, released early in 2008, received "mixed buzz" over Tom Cruise's portraying von Stauffenberg with an American accent. The trade paper Variety described the trailer as "dour and ... like it was selling a talky stage play with a cast of old British actors". Images of Tom Cruise as Colonel von Stauffenberg that surfaced during filming were widely ridiculed. Terry Press, a marketing consultant with the studio, said that Valkyrie had been wrongly labeled as "the Tom Cruise eye-patch movie".
As the December release date approached, United Artists launched a campaign to reform public perception of the film, downplaying the role of Tom Cruise as a German war hero and instead pitching Valkyrie as "a character-driven suspense thriller". The new campaign also played up the reputation of director Bryan Singer, who had directed the thrillers The Usual Suspects (1995) and Apt Pupil (1998). Terry Press urged foregoing an awards campaign for the film; Cruise agreed with the consultant, while Singer was disappointed about the decision. Instead, the studio focused on audience appeal in a competitive time frame in late December. A second theatrical trailer and a new poster were unveiled in October 2008 by United Artists to renew Valkyrie's viability with audiences and accolades. The poster was designed to have flashy graphics and to emulate the posters from the war films The Great Escape (1963) and The Dirty Dozen (1967) in having a team as a central visual. The team element was based on market research from the studio's focus groups who indicated that they liked Cruise as "a character leading a group of people toward solving a problem". The new trailer accentuated action, and was widely considered an improvement over the first trailer. An internal MGM memo reported the reception of the trailer by online communities to be "significantly favorable" compared to the previous trailer. The studio sought two demographic quadrants: males over 35 years old as well as younger males. Since United Artists reported that the film cost $75 million to make and that $60 million was spent on marketing, the studio faced high financial stakes. The film also tested the determination of its distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the mettle of Cruise as a superstar.
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