HOLLYWOOD -- Over the past year, movie marketing teams have faced their fair share of challenges, from pitching Meryl Streep as an ABBA-singing mom (score!) to selling Mike Myers as a soundbite-dispensing, matchmaking guru (miss!).

But nothing has posed quite the conundrum as promoting Tom Cruise as an eye patch-sporting, high-ranking German officer in Valkyrie.

Not that the title alone wouldn't have had the suits at United Artists sitting up nights trying to come up with a workable hook --"Valkyrie. It rhymes with ... uh ... wait a second ... er ... Al ... ka ... Seltzer?"

But there were more challenging problems involved in getting potential audiences intrigued by the prospect of All-American Cruise, with eye patch in tow, playing one Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, who was involved in a botched plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

The whole setup admittedly sounded more like something out of the wacky mind of Mel Brooks than a fact-based story, and the newly resurrected United Artists (headed up by Cruise) realized they were in trouble when the first publicity photos of the film's star avec patch surfaced earlier this year.

Folks were actually giggling.

Giggling!

In an understandable panic, studio executives thought it best to move the movie (with a production budget well north of $75 million) out of its original summer slot, where it would have had to do battle with Disney's WALL-E, and into October.

The delay would have also allowed director Bryan Singer (the first two X-Men films, the last Superman) more time to tinker with a big battle sequence.

But when Valkyrie was again rescheduled to February 2009, rumours began circulating that United Artists had lost faith in it as a serious awards contender, so its release was shuffled one last time -- to the day after Christmas.

The latest billboards for the movie pretty much say it all -- not only is Cruise no longer prominent, but the Second World War element has been downplayed in favour of a thriller vibe.

In essence, the artwork not-so-inadvertently resembles Singer's big breakthrough film The Usual Suspects.

Will it be enough to get United Artists back in the game after stumbling badly with Lions for Lambs?

Will Cruise join the small-but-mighty group of iconic big-screen patch-wearers, such as Snake Plissken, Rooster Cogburn and, of course, Angelina Jolie's Capt. Francesca "Franky" Cook in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

Stay tuned.

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