Avatar: new poster, and the challenge facing Fox

As a new poster for James Cameron's Avatar is released, we ponder the box office hopes for the project...

As James Cameron finally seems to be taking a few of the covers off his incoming mega-budget science fiction flick Avatar, 20th Century Fox has released a one-sheet poster for the film. It features Zoe Saldana, who's playing the role of Neytiri, but as you might expect at this stage, gives very little away. In fact, the poster doesn't even play on the fact that the film is in 3D. It either might be too early for that, or could audiences be getting slightly bored of 3D even before the movie that's set to be offering the best showcase for the technology hits cinema screens?

That, or we could be reading too much into the poster.

Our suspicion still remains that Fox has got a hell of a job to sell the film, given the amount of money it's pumped into it. Granted, the studio steered the woeful Keanu Reeves-headlined remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still to a worldwide take of $230m last winter, and Avatar has the distinct advantage of being likely to be very good. But it also cost the best part of $200m to make, and that's the kind of budget that usually surrounds a summer movie, rather than a winter science fiction film, where the window to recap box office dollars tends to be smaller.

There's little doubt that virtually all of us who work on the site had our ticket to Avatar pre-booked in our minds a long time ago. But we're the easy sell. If Fox is looking to get the kind of mainstream crossover success that something like Star Trek enjoyed, you can't help but wonder if it's already a little way behind in its promotional work.

For now, then, take a look at the poster, and click on it to magically make it bigger...