Even though Zack Snyder's Man of Steel ended up moving its release date to June 2013, next December is still packed to the gills with potential winter blockbusters. Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Ang Lee's Life of Pi, Gore Verbinski's Lone Ranger and Philip Noyce's Hunter Killer will all be going up against each other in the three week stretch and now yet another project has entered the contest.

Deadline has learned that Paramount has set a December 21, 2012 release date for the Marc Forster epic zombie film World War Z. Based on the novel by Max Brooks, which is written as an oral history, the film stars Brad Pitt as a journalist who tours the world talking with survivors of the undead apocalypse. In addition to Pitt, the film stars Mireille Enos and James Badge Dale, with Bryan Cranston in talks for a "small but flashy role." The movie, co-financed between Paramount, Skydance Productions, Hemisphere Media Capital, and GK Films, is currently in production.

I truly can't imagine that all of the films scheduled in December 2012 right now will end up staying there. With a December 14th release date, The Hobbit has the jump on all of the other titles, and franchise history has shown that once a J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation moves into theaters it stays at number one for at least three weeks. It's hard to say which movies will move at this point - we're still more than a year and a half out, after all - but expect a report a few months down the line saying that one of the movies has decided to wave the white flag.