Corona | Coming Attractions

20th Century Fox will release Avatar: Special Edition into 3D and 3D IMAX theaters on August 27, 2010. Included in the Special Edition version of the film will be eight more new minutes.

"Audiences repeatedly told me they wanted more of Pandora and wished they could have stayed there longer. So we're making that possible," said director James Cameron in a 20th Century Fox press release. "Avatar: Special Edition will be exclusively in 3D and will have eight minutes of never before seen footage, including new creatures and action scenes. Whether you already love the movie or you've never seen it, with this special edition you'll be seeing it like never before."

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While being interviewed by The Los Angeles Times, James Cameron told the paper that Avatar would get re-released in 3D theaters this August. An additional six minutes of new footage would be included in this release, of which Weta Studios is working on the special effects now.

Avatar has now made $200 million dollars in ticket sales solely from IMAX venues. When the ticket sales are broken down, $120.1 million dollars have come from 179 North American IMAX screens. Avatar is by far the highest-grossing picture shown on IMAX, besting the $71 million attained by The Polar Express.

Avatar has now passed Star Wars and become the third-highest grossing movie of all-time domestically. The original Star Wars took in $460.9 million dollars through its original release and subsequent re-releases; as of yesterday Avatar stood with $505 million dollars domestic and $1.6 billion worldwide. The movie should vault past The Dark Knight's $533 million dollar gross before this weekend.

Yesterday Avatar took in $4.7 million dollars domestically, giving the film enough to eclipse Shrek 2's box office and become the fourth highest-grossing movie of all-time. The cume for Avatar now stands at $445.7 million domestic; it is $15 million dollars away from besting the record help by the original Star Wars.

20th Century Fox has made available James Cameron's screenplay for Avatar as a PDF download. If you want to compare the differences between Cameron's original written version of Pandora and what you saw on the screen, your reading awaits.

And yesterday on its 25th day of release Avatar climbed past the box office tally of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial to become the fifth-highest domestic grossing movie of all time. E.T. made $435.1 million dollars while Avatar currently stands with $435.9 million. Worldwide Avatar has earned $1.34 billion dollars.

Yesterday, on its 20th day of release, Avatar surpassed The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and became the second-highest grossing movie of all-time worldwide. Avatar now stands with a mighty $757,306,612 received from international venues and $374,445,852 from domestic ticket sales. However, the film still has a wide gulf to travel if it wishes to usurp Titanic from the top spot (about $709 million left to go.)

On Monday, January 4, Avatar zoomed by The Dark Knight and became the fourth-highest grossing movie worldwide of all time. As the film's count stood two days ago, Avatar so far had made $1.063 billion dollars in 18 days of release. Released just one year earlier The Dark Knight made $1.001 billion dollars from all global venues.

Sometime today Avatar crossed the threshold of $100 million dollars in domestic ticket sales at the box office. Yesterday it made $16.3 million and today another $16m.

Final ticket sales are now in for Avatar's opening weekend and the movie earned $77,025,481 in its inaugural weekend out. 3,456 screens are showing the film.

The final cut of Avatar has been locked and screened to at least one group of journalists, namely the hollywood Foreign Press Association. The final run time of the movie is also now known: 161 minutes.

An interesting kind of Avatar publicity featurette has been discovered on the French Studio Canal website, one that acts as if Pandora were a real place. Sigourney Weaver narrates the video which provides a general overview of where the planet is located in relation to Earth and facts about the moon's atmosphere and lifeforms. It's like watching a nature show from the future.

MTV will be hosting a live webchat with Avatar stars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, as well as director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau on December 3. Scheduled to last for only 30 minutes, fans will be able to submit their questions either on the MTV site or through the movie's Facebook page. Previously unseen footage from the movie will be shown during the event.

The Fox Movie Channel aired a ten-minute video in their Making a Scene series devoted to Avatar. In it we're given a glimpse into the motion capture process used by the production to create the scene where Jake and Neytiri fly banshees, dragon-like creatures, through the skies of Pandora.

From purely technical and filmmaking angles this is really the sizzle to the steak that we've been waiting for: a chance to see the cutting edge technology that Cameron created to make scenes for his film. In addition to wearing motion capture bodysuits and facial paint to capture the subtlety of their performances, the actors also wore a tiny camera positioned in front of their faces to pick up even more detail.

After the actors' performance was captured and rendered, Cameron could then take a camera and move the perspective of the scene's action by walking through the studio and banking it around. That's what a $300 million dollar budget can get for you today.

Last evening the news program 60 Minutes aired a report about Avatar. If you didn't catch the show, the network has now uploaded the segment. Watch it below:

Bruce Snyder, the president of domestic distribution for 20th Century Fox tells The Hollywood Reporter that the running time for Avatar should be 150 minutes -- two-and-a-half hours long. Snyder also states that Avatar's total running time could run an additional six minutes, with credits.