Avatar Pictures, Tickets, and Delgo Nonsense

Published by Jeff Leins on: August 27th, 2009

The new issue of Empire Magazine features James Cameron’s Avatar on the cover and plenty of exclusive images from the highly-anticipated epic.  I apologize in advance for how packed this post is, but the hype machine is moving so quickly it’s difficult to keep up.

Last week, 20th Century Fox kicked off a flashy marketing campaign, including the teaser trailer.  New pictures have already surfaced that give better glimpses of the avatars used by Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver to roam the planet of Pandora.

It gives us a better look at Weaver who plays Dr. Grace Augustine, the head of the experimental Avatar program.  Plus our first look at Weaver’s Avatar, which she uses to guide the rookie Worthington around the planet and teach him to interact with the Na’vi race.  Here are two side-by-side comparisons:

The next set is Zoe Saldana’s face captured and fixed on Neytiri, a member of Na’vi royalty.

A closer look at Stephen Lang (Col. Quaritch), his faced scarred by an encounter with a Pandoran beast

For more images, check out Empire Online and the bonus pictures at the bottom.

If you like what you’ve seen so far, you’ll have to get in line.  Tickets for the midnight showtimes of Avatar are already on sale… four months in advance.  The film isn’t available in theaters until 12:01am December 18, 2009, but you can order tickets on Fandango and MovieTickets.com.

AMC made available 75 locations, most of them IMAX 3-D capable, after last Friday’s “Avatar Day” promotion organized by 20th Century Fox.  The studio’s senior VP distribution Chris Aronson admitted it was the theater company’s idea to start the sales early.  “[AMC] said that if all these people are going to come to our theater to see 16 minutes of a film that doesn’t open until December, let’s give them an opportunity to buy tickets to the first performances of the show itself.” It makes sense in an incredibly geeky way.

Sales after one day were described as “healthy.”  I’m just going to make a wild, unsubstantiated assumption that the ticket holders are just the opposite.

When the trailer was released last week, several websites (including MovieLine) quickly jumped to the conclusion that the character design looked eerily similar to Delgo, an animated movie that was a disaster at the box office.  With ten years of work and a production budget of $40 million, the Fathom Studios production couldn’t even muster $1 million in America and wound up one of the biggest flops of all time.

The comparisons to Avatar are flimsy and done mostly in jest, but the creators of Delgo believes the similarities exist.  Here’s the press release from Fathom Studios:

From what we have seen, we are amazed by the visual similarities between the two films and we are reviewing what legal options may be available to us. Delgo is an independent film that took over a decade from conception to release. The initial proof-of-concept was available on Delgo.com in 1998 with work-in-progress from the feature production accessible via the website’s Digital Dailies since 2000. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Avatar began production in 2006 after a rewrite of the script.

Sounds like someone is trying to ride the coattails and snatch a little publicity for their failed film.  Legal options?  Give me a break.  James Cameron isn’t stealing material from a random, who-cares animated movie to develop his groundbreaking, motion capture epic.  If anything he borrowed heavily from Pocahontas.  Besides, Cameron wrote the 80-page “scriptment” as far back as 1994, so the idea for floating rocks, blue-skinned natives, and leafy landscapes were probably conceived before a bad animated movie that came out last year.

Now back to the images!  Here are three from a French magazine called “Studio Ciné-Live” and courtesy of MarketSaw: