Here’s kind of a weird story today that has cropped up surrounding the marketing for Bryan Singer’s upcoming WWII film Valkyrie starring Tom Cruise. There’s been a lot of negative buzz surrounding it thus far, with a poor performance by Cruise being at the top of the list of suspected reasons that it was delayed until next year. But now here’s another little conspiracy theory that, if it’s true, makes United Artists seem even more insecure about the film.

There is a comparision head shot that was released online last summer that illustrates some striking similarities between Tom Cruise and Claus von Stauffenberg, the German officer that he portrays in the film. Now, nearly a year later, the folks over at Slate.com have investigated a strange rumour that UA tweaked the photograph to artificially make von Stauffenberg resemble Tommy Boy more closely. An impromptu analysis by some of Slate’s graphic designers concludes that it was indeed altered, albeit very subtly. Weird. I guess it just goes to show how far marketers will go to make you believe in the reality of their film. The thing is, will this really make more people want to see the movie? If they hadn’t released the photo in the first place, no one would even know what Claus von Stauffenberg looked like!