The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Although you'd think people would spend the holidays in their homes catching up with their families and what-not, they actually tend to go to the movies after opening gifts and having awkward conversations. And Christmas Day moviegoers had a bunch of options this week, with recent releases (and not-so-recent releases) still going strong and a whole bunch of new releases arriving to coincide with the holiday.

http://youtu.be/RTWPbgh5eiA
Ben Stiller's 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' has already screened for numerous critics, which shows that Fox and Stiller think (or thought) they have an Oscar picture on their hands. Which may be why they've released multiple trailers to get audiences familiar with Stiller's Mitty and his flights of fancy.

In 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,' Ben Stiller plays an ordinary, average guy -- a little too ordinary and average perhaps. He's never really traveled or gone anywhere special, he's never done anything exceptional. He just lives his day-to-day, monotonous life without any real excitement, as alarmingly pointed out to him by an eHarmony tech support worker -- of all people -- in the latest clip.

A daydreamer who escapes his anonymous life by disappearing into a world of fantasies filled with heroism, romance and action.

The timing of the new 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' trailer is impeccable. Ben Stiller's latest effort as a director premiered to mixed-but-passionate reviews at the New York Film Festival this past weekend and this new look at the film feels prepared to ride that buzz all the way to film's December release (and the 2014 Oscars?).

After years of being one of America's favorite funny guys, it looks like Ben Stiller is really trying to do something different. The trailer for 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' has arrived and it features Stiller, as an actor and as a director, stretching his talents in a way that we haven't seen before.

It's easy to see a release date move as just card shuffling, but a movie's success or failure is often linked to when it comes out. Would 'Battleship' and 'Dark Shadows' tanked as hard as they did if they weren't caught in the wake of 'The Avengers?' We now have new release dates for 'The Lone Ranger,' 'Thor 2' 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' and more.

We haven't seen much of Sean Penn since he appeared in Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life' last year, but now word comes down that he is doing, of all things, a comedy. The intense (see above), Oscar-winning actor is joining Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig and Patton Oswalt in 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.'