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I don't know how many moons orbit Cameron's fantasy planet Pandora, but I'm just going to assume they're currently all heading for alignment. Screen Daily tells us that Avatar's two-months away release in China has caused no less than four of its own would-be blockbusters to hide from the giant shadow the blue cat-people will inevitably cast when they debut there January 1st. Zhang Yimou's remake of the Coen Brother's 1984 directorial debut Blood Simple has now decided to bow closer towards the beginning of December. Same goes for the road movie Wu Ren Qu, The Pang brother's fantasy/action sequel The Storm Warriors, and the sci-fi western Treasure Hunter (starring Jay Chou, who America will soon know as Kato in The Green Hornet).

Now I understand that few people who read Cinematical are going to be affected by the release date shift of those four films, but what makes this news worth paying attention to is the fact that these changes slot Avatar into a position in which it could conceivably earn its budget back from Chinese cinemas alone. The biggest time of the year for the Chinese box office is the three month window that covers Christmas, New Year, and the Chinese Lunar New Year and now that these four domestic films have made way for an international usurper, it means Avatar will be taking over a whopping 80% of China's screens during its most crucial box office season.

Usually the Internet has to wait for something to become popular before its denizens start dressing up like it. Alas, further proving that there is little typical about James Cameron's Avatar, it has broken that cycle by inspiring an enthusiastic YouTuber's Halloween costume nearly two months before the movie is set for release.

Attempting to pull off Sam Worthington's character of Jake Sulley, the fan in question explains that it took countless days of planning and roughly five hours of makeup on the final day, which sounds like a lot of a devotion, but if you ask me it was worth it. Baring the necessary facial reconstructive surgery to make it look like he was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and taking some Skele-Grow to bump his height up another two feet to truly complete the look, I'd say this is a damned impressive bit of cosplay; particularly considering he would only have been able to use promo materials as his sources and not the end product.

His tail could use a bit of work, but the modded Nerf gun he has more than makes up for it. Plus the guy has a good sense of humor, as evidenced by a picture of him in front of a toy display at a store.

Watch the video and see the full costume over at SciFi Squad

Reminder: Cinematical's Fifth Annual Halloween Costume Contest is still accepting entries till this Friday, so keep sending them in.

Avatar
A paraplegic marine from Earth has his consciousness transferred into an alien body so he can infiltrate the native people of a distant planet. More so than the teaser, this one gives a better idea of what the story is all about rather than just showing off the digital effects (which ARE pretty awesome). James Cameron's latest hits theaters on December 18.

Green Zone
Military action flick starring Matt Damon as a U.S. soldier searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The story is inspired by the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The bit about Damon's character wanting to know why things are happening seems kind of heavy handed and I half expected Jack Nicholson to pop up and tell him "you can't handle the truth." Still, this looks like it's got a lot going for it. Watch for this one on March 12.

It's no secret that James Cameron's Avatar has been fighting an up-hill battle for years. Film geeks, particularly those who spend most of their time online, are a tough crowd to uniformly please, so early buzz on the film was as much an excitement accelerator as it was a dare to dislike. When the first trailer for the film was at long last unveiled back in August, it was met with incredulous, befuddled cries of "Is that it?"

If, like myself, you were disappointed with that first teaser, and if, like myself, you avoided Avatar Day and any subsequent new marketing tactics outside of the normal trailer build up, then maybe this new, full trailer for Cameron's return to science fiction will be the first time you set aside your cynicism and think "Alright, I get what all the fuss is about now." This second trailer is nearly identical to the international trailer that has been making the online rounds lately, except there's one huge difference: this isn't a blurry hint of things to come. Yahoo has the debut, and we all know that means a crystal-clear, HD if-you-want-it look at the alien world of Pandora.

Unlike the first trailer, there's no teasing going on here; this is an exposition-heavy tour of the film's plot, characters, and, most importantly, alien Na'vi. Not only do we have more than one line of dialog now, but we're given context-relevant glimpses at what will, I no longer doubt, be the must-see spectacle film of 2009.

Click on over to Yahoo and check it out. If this expanded foray into jungle battles doesn't get you pumped for December 18th, I don't think anything will.

While we await the next full-length Avatar trailer (a similar international version is up over at SciFi Squad for those interested), a new four-minute behind-the-scenes featurette has found its way online. Basically this takes you through the film's backstory, featuring interviews with James Cameron and the cast mixed with scenes from the film. Yes, it's your basic featurette, but since we're all dying to see as much as we can of this film before it hits theaters on December 18, it's stuff like this that should hold you over.

The brand new domestic Avatar trailer will arrive online later today at about 1pm EST (10am PST), and at that time we'll let you know where you can go check it out in HD. After all, if we can't be watching these trailers and featurettes on the big screen, the next best thing is HD (and, in my opinion, we really shouldn't judge the film until then). I still have concerns about the story, though, which just seems full of cliches and stuff we've seen countless times before, but I'm personally more excited for the visual experience than I am for any story. Cameron has been talking up the 3D technology in his film for a long time now, and so that's what we should all be looking forward to -- a kickass, monumental moviegoing experience. Until then, everything else is just a tasty little appetizer.

Watch the featurette after the jump.

While geeks the world over are eagerly awaiting Avatar, the return of James Cameron to the original sci-fi territory he's proven a master over with The Abyss and Terminator/Terminator 2, fans of obscure science fiction novellas from 1957 are being struck with deja vu. A reader tipped off genre champions io9 to the story Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson, a story that sounds remarkably like Cameron's supposedly original script that revolves around humans that use the bodies of an alien species via a mental connection as physical avatars, and proceed to use said avatars to exploit the resources of the alien's home world.

From the io9 post, "Like Avatar, Call Me Joe centers on a paraplegic - Ed Anglesey - who telepathically connects with an artificially created life form in order to explore a harsh planet (in this case, Jupiter). Anglesey, like Avatar's Jake Sully, revels in the freedom and strength of his artificial created body, battles predators on the surface of Jupiter, and gradually goes native as he spends more time connected to his artificial body."

Read the rest over at SciFi Squad

Last night saw attendees of the Real D-sponsored Fantastic Fest greeted with an extended look at footage from James Cameron's forthcoming Avatar, and with it (for me at least) a more defined shift in expectations for the long-awaited film. The footage -- more often than not composed of extended scenes from Avatar Day -- still looks terrifically realized in 3-D, but the bits and pieces of story filled in by producer Jon Landau between scenes and the voice-over of Sam Worthington's character during them suggest something a little less... rapturous.

The lovely Zoe Saldana is quickly becoming a name to contend with after managing to land plum parts in not one, but two of the biggest sci-fi films of the decade: Star Trek and Avatar. One is a bonafide hit, the other remains shrouded in a lot of mystery, but it's a mark of Saldana's star power that she's making a name outside of their huge hype. Plus, she's becoming an action heroine in her own right, and just might be our generation's Sigourney Weaver or Linda Hamilton.

We had the chance to catch up with Saldana this week, and she was game to talk about both projects. Of course with the Star Trek sequel still in a misty writing stage, she didn't have any big secrets to spill, but she shared the opinion of a lot of female Trek fans in hoping Uhura gets to do a little butt-kicking later on. "In Star Trek, I had so much fun, but the boys got all the action! J.J. [Abrams] promised me that I'm going to -- [that] in the sequel, she will have at least one little fight. I mean, just [let me] kick a guy in the groin or something!" Laughing, she revealed that there was an enormous ongoing e-mail list among the cast, Abrams, and the Trek producers where they regularly chat and joke back and forth. From the sound of it, that's also where the groin-kicking requests are made.

Go below the jump for Saldana talking all about Avatar!

It's not exactly original for someone to use this clip from the 2004 film Downfall and change around the dialogue. We've seen it countless times before, with the most recent being Hitler's reaction to the death of Michael Jackson. But the videos are only as good as the person writing the dialogue, and I'm sorry if you don't agree with me here -- but this one just cracked me the hell up.

In the video after the jump, watch as Hitler freaks out over the failure of James Cameron's Avatar trailer, comparing it to The Land Before Time 3 (among other things) with lines like, "He should have left the remake of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest to Lucas!" Thankfully not everyone is hating on Avatar as much as Hitler, and as our own William Goss and Jessica Barnes recently reported, the sneak preview footage in 3D was pretty fantastic to watch.

Will Avatar turn out to be the bomb Hitler thinks it is? Or will it redeem itself by wowing audiences in theaters this December 18? Guess we'll see ... but in the meantime, check out Hitler's hilarious Avatar reaction after the jump.

In the day's "frivolous lawsuit" news, according to a story on PR Newswire, Fathom Studios, the producers of the little-seen animated film Delgo are contemplating legal action against the makers of Avatar, James Cameron's 12-years-in-the-making return to mainstream filmmaking. "From what we have seen, we are amazed by the visual similarities between the two films," a Fathom spokesperson said. "We are reviewing what legal options may be available to us."

The bad news for Fathom is that lawyers for Fox, the studio distributing Cameron's film, are tenacious and shrewd; earlier this year, a dispute between Fox and Warner Brothers over the adaptation rights of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' source material almost derailed the release of Watchmen, and the subsequent settlement virtually ensured that Warner turn over a big chunk of the film's profits to Fox. And of course, there's also the fact that a trailer for a film may or may not actually contain all of a film's surprises, story developments, or ideas, so Fathom may be gobsmacked over several images in the teaser which ultimately have little or nothing to do with Avatar's overall content.