An interesting piece from Variety:

Posted: Thurs., Jul. 23, 2009, 6:28pm PT

James Cameron previews 'Avatar'
Director unveils film footage at Comic-Con
By KRISTINA RETTIG

James Cameron began making the rounds with "Avatar" footage in June at Cinema Expo, followed by a five-hour mini-conference to woo exhibitors earlier this month at Grauman's Chinese. But the truest test of his film's hype would be fulfilling his promise to show 20 minutes of footage to the fans that deified him after films like "Terminator," "Terminator: 2," "Aliens," "The Abyss" and, to a lesser extent (at least at Comic-Con), "Titanic."

Cameron fans have come to expect a certain standard. When the director takes his time to develop something groundbreaking (i.e. the morphing technology in "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2"), his audience has been richly rewarded. However, there's never been this much anticipation and mystery surrounding one of Cameron's projects, leaving the fans in Hall H to nervously wonder if he can deliver.

After very little preamble from Cameron (he came to the podium to ask, "Are you ready to go to Pandora?"), what ensued was 20-25 minutes of a sci-fi fever dream. Employing what appears to be (at the least) a mix of CGI, performance capture and green screen, the footage should continue to stir very positive buzz.

For the fans, the footage was the equivalent of a cinematic second coming and the panel that followed seemed pretty tame. Moderator/producer Jon Landau oversaw a discussion between Sigourney Weaver, Steven Lang, Zoe Saldana and Cameron about the characters and the "Avatar" filmmaking experience. Cameron gave a shout-out to Peter Jackson, claiming the technological mastery behind Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" was one of his cues to make "Avatar."

At the end of the panel, Cameron announced that on August 21, he would take over a number of IMAX and 3D theaters to show the public 15 minutes of "Avatar" as a way to compensate those who couldn't be at the conference.

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This from The Hollywood Reporter:

James Cameron teasing 'Avatar' for free on Imax, 3D screens
By Steven Zeitchik and Borys Kit

"Avatar" alert: Speaking at Comic-Con on Thursday, James Cameron announced that on Aug. 21, 20th Century Fox will take over as many Imax and 3D screens around the world as it can to show 15 minutes of promotional footage from "Avatar" to stoke buzz for the sci-fi flick. The screenings, in a highly unusual move, will be offered free of charge to pave the way for the film, which opens in the U.S. on Dec. 18.

Cameron and Fox took the wraps off their pricey, visually splashy 3D movie at the San Diego Convention Center's Hall H on Thursday, to a deeply enthusiastic, if not over-the-top hysterical, crowd on Thursday afternoon.

Cameron warmed up the sci-fi-minded crowd by asking, "Who wants to go to another planet?" before rolling nearly 25 minutes of scenes from his otherworldly tale, which is set on the fictional planet of Pandorum.

A few expositional scenes showing main character Sam Worthington becoming an avatar (a blue-skinned human-alien hybrid) segued into a series of jungle battle scenes -- many of them of striking color and scope -- in which Worthington and co-star Zoe Saldana fight with prehistoric-looking creatures.

The footage showed a vividly original world complete with its own language and ecology.

"Everybody always asks, where have you been? Well, that's where I've been: Pandorum," said Cameron, who hasn't directed a narrative feature since 1997's "Titanic."

The footage overlapped with but was not identical to the slightly shorter material that Fox showed at Cinema Expo in Amsterdam last month, the studio said.

The stakes are high for Fox, which has made the Dec. 18 film the cornerstone of its fall slate. The film is important enough to the studio that it was introduced by Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairman Tom Rothman, who noted that "moments likes these are rare for a movie company."

At a news conference after the panel, Cameron acknowledged the studio's support, saying: "They wrote us a big check and were with us right down the line."

How big a check has become one of the bigger Hollywood mysteries of the season. While some estimates have pegged the budget for "Avatar" in the $300 million range, Fox has stuck to a figure much closer to $230 million.

Cameron has faced a lot of talk about budgets ever since "Titanic," which went on to become the biggest worldwide grosser in history with $1.8 billion, was released.

If the "Avatar" footage didn't elicit the hysterical reactions of the "New Moon" and "Alice in Wonderland" panels earlier in the day from the Comic-Con faithful, that was understandable. The "Avatar" unspooling marks one of the rare times in recent Comic-Con memory that a film of this scale has not been based on a pre-existing property.

That the film is an unknown quantity poses both an advantage and a disadvantage for Fox: While the movie comes without the benefit of prior awareness (and thus makes it a harder sell in the short run), it gives the studio a chance to shape perception in a way that remakes and sequels don't allow.

The need to build awareness was behind Cameron's surprise announcement about screening footage for free in theaters in August.

While the unusual move to give moviegoers a deeper look at the upcoming movie is an expensive gambit for the studio's marketing department, Fox clearly hopes it will show people what cannot simply be translated in a 2D trailer or in TV spots.

Of that 15 minutes, reserve three of 'em. Because the trailer for Avatar will be included in this unprecedented event.

Did anyone catch the 15 minute IMAX footage?

Here's a NYTimes article - apparently quite favorable response at one screening -

(this proves nothing, but it does serve as a dose of reality for those who are so sure this will be a disaster - they, like me, don't know enough to be so sure)

Blockbuster Trailer: The Selling of ‘Avatar’
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and DAVE ITZKOFF
LOS ANGELES — The movie of the future just got a publicity stunt to match.

In an audacious marketing ploy, 20th Century Fox and the filmmaker James Cameron showed a little more than 15 minutes of their holiday-season film “Avatar” — a science-fiction thriller whose advanced 3-D technology has sparked talk about the transformation of the moviegoing experience — at a specially ticketed event on giant Imax screens around the world Friday evening.

As the screenings began in New York, the fans were receptive, if not quite blown away. “I thought it was very impressive, the depth and the scope of it,” said Richard Sullivan, a data analyst from Manhattan who saw the film at the AMC Lincoln Square theaters on New York’s Upper West Side. “It was not quite photorealistic, but they’re making progress.”

Viewers were largely quiet at the start of a promotional screening that opened with a recorded introduction by Mr. Cameron, who promised that the clips, drawn from the first half of the movie, included no “spoilers.” But they worked up some whoops at the sight of an alien dinosaur attack, and applauded enthusiastically at the end of the sampler.

In “Avatar,” a human soldier played by Sam Worthington visits the mythical planet of Pandora, where he lives, loves and fights inside the manufactured body of an alien.

More than 100,000 viewers were expected to attend the screenings. They got in by scrambling to a Web site, avatarmovie.com, which made free tickets available on Monday — and then immediately bogged down with a surplus of requests.

Initially, each of slightly more than 100 Imax theaters in the United States and about 30 abroad were to host two back-to-back “Avatar” presentations, most of those between showings of Warner Brothers’ “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” But the plan changed, as some theaters — including those in New York and Los Angeles — were overbooked and had to schedule extra screenings.

Greg Foster, the chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, said he was not aware of any contemporary movie promotion that had gone quite so far in making an event out of a film tease. Before releasing “The Dark Knight,” Warner Brothers took the unusual step of showing a six-minute opening sequence in theaters that were screening its film “I Am Legend,” but viewers were ticketed for the main event, not just the extended trailer.

“Those are our ambassadors,” Mr. Foster said of the moviegoers who lined up to sample Mr. Cameron’s handiwork. “Those are the people who will spread the gospel of ‘Avatar’ and of Imax and of the movie business.”

In fact, the Friday night screenings will help Fox take the pulse of its audience: Tom Rothman, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, was expected to do that in person at the Bridge Cinema Deluxe in Los Angeles.

And the showings — along with some accompanying “Avatar Day” hoopla around a Ubisoft game poster, a Mattel toy line and a more conventional trailer released online on Thursday — were meant to help Fox solve a marketing conundrum. How can the studio introduce a film that promises, in its three-dimensional version, to be revolutionary without undercutting the potential of the two-dimensional version, which will also have to do well if Fox is to recoup a production budget reported to have topped $200 million?

The number of 3-D screens has been growing, as Hollywood increasingly relies on the format to boost ticket sales. It appears that as many as 3,500 screens will be operating in the United States, and perhaps 4,000 abroad, by the time Fox releases “Avatar” on Dec. 18 — far more than in the past, but still not enough to sustain an entire blockbuster release.

Online reaction to an abbreviated two-minute version of the trailer that hit the Web on Thursday was decidedly mixed. The cinema-fan blog The Playlist (theplaylist.blogspot.com) asked rhetorically: “This is supposed to be the game changer this year? Maybe it does look astonishing in 3D and on the big screen, but it practically looks comical in this Internet-trailer form.”

The Web site spout.com rapidly posted a Top 10 list of previous science-fiction and fantasy films that the “Avatar” trailer unfortunately resembled, including misfires like “Dungeons & Dragons” and “Delgo.”

In New York, Ramon Feliciano, an assistant manager at a consulting firm, was the first person in line at the AMC, having arrived at 12:30 p.m. After the screening, Mr. Feliciano said he was still a little puzzled by the experience.

“What I saw was looking great, but characterwise I couldn’t tell who they are, what they do,” he said.

Mr. Sullivan, however, was sold.

“I’ll probably just go buy my ticket now,” he said. “Why not?”

Thanks for this article!

Vanity Fair writer's take on the Avatar trailer (not footage):

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Don't Be Fooled by Avatar's Lame Trailer
by Frank DiGiacomo
August 21, 2009, 12:00 PM
In the day or so since the release of a teaser trailer for Avatar, filmmaker James Cameron’s first non-documentary motion picture since his Oscar-winning Titanic was released in 1997, the media and the blogosphere’s reaction to the clip has been decidedly and justifiably mixed. Strangely, the problem with the clip is story—something that has always been Cameron’s strong suit, whether you’re talking Terminator, Aliens, Titanic or any of the other blockbusters the former truck driver has directed.
The Avatar trailer seems designed to show off the picture’s state-of-the-art special effects and computer animation, which it certainly does. We see huge-ass spaceships and mechanized walkers not unlike the AT-STs that populated George Lucas’ first Star Wars trilogy—seeing Star Wars is reportedly what inspired Cameron to get into the movie business—and a misty, blue-hued world of floating mesas and fluorescent jungles inhabited by similarly blue-skinned, elfin-eared warriors who co-exist with all sorts of exotic, dinosaur-like creatures. (Not to get too geeky about this, but the creatures in Avatar seem inspired by the blue-skinned Twi’leks that also populate Lucas’ Star Wars universe.) Into this green-screen wonderland rolls actor Sam Worthington—who was a human-skinned robot in Terminator Salvation, but is wheelchair-bound in Avatar. If you haven’t investigated the plot of Avatar, then these nearly dialogue-free scenes will confuse the hell out of you, but even if you do know a bit about the story, the presentation is underwhelming.


So that everyone reading this is on the same page, the story revolves around Jake Sully, the crippled soldier played by Worthington, who, through the miracle of science is able to mind-meld with a genetically modified version of the blue creatures—called Na’vi. (What is it with alien races and apostrophes?) Via this surrogate body, Sully regains the use of his limbs and is able to breath Pandora’s atmosphere, which is toxic to humans. I’m guessing here, but I suspect Worthington’s character starts out as a kind of special-ops spy who is supposed to infiltrate the Na’vi in order to help Earth take over the planet and plunder its abundant natural resources. I’m also guessing that, instead, Worthington falls in love with the Na’vi culture and one of its long-limbed female warriors named Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana) and, after a little French fanging, finds himself torn between carrying out his mission and saving Pandora from his own kind, thus becoming a target for both sides. I don’t know about you, but I’m suddenly thinking Dances with Wolves in space. (Somebody get me Bobby Zarem on the line.)

In Cameron’s capable hands, it’s the kind of movie that, despite its reported $300+ million budget, could rake in a fortune at the box office because Avatar’s director is that rare filmmaker who understands that special effects, no matter how ambitious, must take a back seat to strong characters. The visuals in Aliens and Titanic were spectacular, but what I remember and love from those movies are, respectively, Ripley’s fierce motherly love for child survivor Newt, and Jack’s love affair with Rose aboard the ill-fated cruise liner. The problem with the Avatar trailer is that it’s heavy on the visual pyrotechnics that will attract the science-fiction and video-game geeks, but sadly lacking in providing the typical filmgoer—the ones who packed theaters week after week to see Titanic multiple times—with some reason to invest in the movie’s characters. I’m hoping that Cameron delivers more of that latter element to filmgoers who are going to see the extended 15-minute excerpt of Avatar that is playing in theaters today—I didn’t score a ticket, but I invite anyone who does see it to weigh in in the comments section below.

As disappointed as I am with the Avatar trailer, you’ll still see me in line for the movie. I tend to agree with Marathon Man screenwriter William Goldman that in the movie business, nobody knows anything, but after years covering the movie industry, I do know that it’s not such a good idea to bet against James Cameron. These days, he is portrayed as the hero who bet big on Titanic and won, but I still remember the weeks and months before that movie’s release when everyone was predicting that Titanic the movie was going to follow the actual ship to an icy Hollywood doom. Then again, Cameron is hardly infallible. Hollywood’s Establishment reacted allergically to the “I’m king of the world—wooo-hooo!” acceptance speech that Cameron gave upon winning the Best Picture Oscar for Titanic in 1998. (There are tacit but nonetheless complex and inviolable rules when it comes to displaying hubris on Academy Awards night.) Come December, we’ll know whether Avatar and the Na’vi are a breed of fascinating new characters in an engrossing new movie, or the manifestations of a metastasized ego akin to the Blue Meanies in The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. If it turns out to be the latter, I can already see the media’s smart-ass references to Jim Cameron’s ‘blue period.’ They won’t be referring to the azure cinematic palette of Avatar.

Video of Avatar reaction

quote:

Originally posted by Aura:
Video of Avatar reaction

Hilarious! This movie does look exactly like a mash-up of the "Star Wars" prequels and "Thundercats".

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that was damn hilarious. I liked that although i disagree with the sam worthington snippet. i thought he saved/made TS better. But take it with a grain of salt because this video was too funny

O please. As if I care what Hitler thinks.

Tickets have been put on sale for the Dec 18 midnight shows of Avatar, nearly four months before the opening dates.

I assume this is not just for PR purposes but to help get the film as many seats and multiple screens during the most fought-over period in the year in theatres.

I thought I would bump up this thread. I realize it's over a month and a half before the film opens to general audiences.
But in the meantime we can all trash the blue kangaroos and make fun of it before it opens. Or maybe not.
But it might dispel any delusional or revisionist perceptions about whether this film was lauded by the critics or not.

I cant be the only one who is anticipating seeing it, and also hoping that it's GREAT.

I have a totally open mind. I wasn't that much of a fan of Cameron's before Titanic (although he made the best Aliens film), but of course I regard that film as touching greatness. Whether it was a one-shot wonder I don't know, but my mind is open.

I have seen no one elsewhere wonder if Cameron will force Academy members to see this in 3D - I think this is one of the most interesting mysteries and possible strategic moves of the year.

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quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
...although he made the best Aliens film...

ER, no, that was Ridley Scott.

Well, the film is unwatchable without those awful glasses. Are you suggesting there is a two dimensional version of this film?

The Academy is either going to watch this or not. I cant imagine Cameron forcing anyone to watch it. He cant, anyways.

Saw it right before it opened, didn't care for it, can't work up the energy to see it again (as is the case with nearly all of Scott's work for me, although I have tried to admire Blade Runner several times without a lot of success).

quote:

Well, the film is unwatchable without those awful glasses. Are you suggesting there is a two dimensional version of this film?

The Academy is either going to watch this or not. I cant imagine Cameron forcing anyone to watch it. He cant, anyways.

You know, I'm not sure now that you mentioned it if it will have a 2D version. If it doesn't it won't have maximum theatres.

It's a huge role of the dice. I hope it works.

He can't force the Academy to watch it in 3D. But he can tell them they aren't getting 2D screeners.

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quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Saw it right before it opened, didn't care for it, can't work up the energy to see it again (as is the case with nearly all of Scott's work for me, although I have tried to admire Blade Runner several times without a lot of success).

What?

Alien. I didn't care for it at all.

I like Aliens a lot.

Scott to me too often has seemed like a Kubrick-wannabe.

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