Director Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables musical, first slated for December 14th will now be singing and crying its way to a Christmas Day release. This according Deadline’s Mike Flemming, who goes on to say that the studio feels they’ll fare better on the holiday now that they’ve surveyed Hooper’s submitted cut.

December 14th would’ve of course put Les Miserables in direct competition with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – not a battle it’d have been likely to win. And it’s a less crowded Christmas this year than first appeared as Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby had been pushed back to 2013 while Ang Lee’s Life of Pi has been bumped up to November 21st of this year. Still, it leaves quite the interesting faceoff between Miserables and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

I don’t wish to speculate as to which film will steal more attention from Jesus on his birthday; I just know I’m looking forward to one interesting double feature on December 25th, 2012.