With all the talk about the great “unknowns” this season, with “Young Adult” and “J. Edgar” having dropped over the last week and “War Horse,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” still to come, Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought a Zoo” has kind of fallen through the cracks of expectation. I haven’t heard much about it and most seemed to disavow it after that saccharine-loaded trailer, but I’m actually looking forward to it with fingers crossed.

Details of the Jónsi-led soundtrack were recently revealed and I noted in a Best Original Song finger-to-the-wind post that the track “Gathering Stories” will be in the mix for that category. But what else could register for the film? Is Matt Damon lurking as a Best Actor possibility? Is the adapted screenplay up to snuff? I just don’t know.

But I do know that the new poster for the film is a nice little marketing stroke. None of the one-sheets for the film so far have taken the bait of plastering Damon or Scarlett Johansson’s face on there, which is nice. Posters these days are always inevitable tragedies of art work. The latest “Carnage” example, for instance, just had me deleting the email, shaking my head this morning.

Check out the “We Bought a Zoo” poster below. The film opens nationwide on December 23.