Though you might have thought that 20th Century Fox would go big with The Wolverin****e during its product presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday, the stars of the show were actually Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy comedy The Heat and, more unexpectedly, Ben Stiller’s new take on T****he Secret Life Of Walter Mitty.
The film finds Stiller (who also directs) as the titular Mitty, a Life magazine picture librarian whose life has fallen into a dull rut and who fills his time daydreaming about adventures. When an all-important negative for a cover shot goes missing, Mitty seizes his chance to take on a proper adventure, even if he’ll need a little encouragement from Wiig, a co-worker he has a crush on.
Though it seemed like the seed for a basic comedy, Stiller has bigger dreams and unveiled footage that features epic travels to Iceland, Greenland and elsewhere, some impressive fantasy sequences, shark attacks and even a David Bowie track that provides an emotional moment for our hero.
“We were looking at the movie not as just a comedy, with different criteria about how to connect with an audience and tell a story," he said during a press conference after the presentation. He introduced the movie alongside Wiig, who praised Stiller’s performance and his Zen calm as a director. “As an actor you never want to see a director freaking out about anything and we felt very safe and taken care of,” she said. "He knows exactly what he wants."
Also part of the Fox presentation was a new **Wolverine **trailer and clips from a raft of upcoming films including Ridley Scott’s **The Counselor **(with Javier Bardem sporting more mad hair), gambling drama Runner, Runner starring Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake, Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters, and animated titles including Epic, Rio 2, How To Train Your Dragon 2, Peanuts (which will be released in 2015), Mr Peabody And Sherman and Turbo.