The next day or two looks like being crucial in the marketing campaign for James Cameron's upcoming Avatar. The official trailer for the film is debuting later on today, ahead of screenings on Inglourious Basterds in the UK. And then cinemas are opening their doors to show a 16 minute preview of the film too, assuming you're one of the lucky ones who got their paws on a ticket.

Fox, now that the big summer blockbusters are out of the way, seems to be finally pulling its finger out where the film's promotion is concerned, and it's now got the best part of four months to convince the world that this is the big blockbuster we all want to see this Christmas. To be fair, in our case the tickets have been sold for some time, but with the festive season packed with big budget efforts such as The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol, Avatar will not be shy of competition when it finally hits cinemas on 18th December (although if you live in Belgium, France or Egypt, you get it first, on the 16th). Given how late into the season it's launching, that doesn't give it an awful lot of time to make its money back in the cinemagoing peak season, especially given that the Oscar-baiters are all due around the same time.

That aside, for many of us there's no film on the planet we're more intrigued to see (with the possible exception of Christopher Nolan's Inception), and thus we're interested to see just what James Cameron is going to let out of the bag in the next 24 hours or so.

In the interim, a new batch of images have been released, primarily character shots. There's also a still from that incoming trailer, too, which we'll have on the site as soon as we get our paws on it.