Three months early, Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie lands in Nevada

Three and half months before it is scheduled to hit the screen, Tom Cruise’s fiercely debated film about Nazi saboteurs is playing right here in Nevada.

According to E! Online reporter Marc Malkin, moviegoers in an undisclosed small town in the Silver State were invited to a free screening at their local theater of, well, something. Something turned out to be Valkyrie, the Bryan Singer movie that chronicles the true story of an unsuccessful assassination plot by German officers against Hitler.

The film, which is slated for mass release on December 26, has hit its share of crater-sized road bumps along the way. Last summer, German officials banned United Artists, the studio responsible for Valkyrie, from shooting at German military sites because of the government’s distaste for the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise, who stars as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, is a long time member. Then there were the extras injured in a freak truck-door-falling-off incident that demanded Cruise and United Artists pay them $11 million.

So, it’s a safe guess that Cruise, Singer and the rest of Valkyrie crew breathed a sigh of relief when they heard the glowing reaction from the Nevada audiences playing the part of Middle America at a recent secret showing. “They liked it,” a source said. Phew.