When the first trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar was released a couple months ago, it wasn’t all that impressive. It really didn’t give you a whole lot of story and the bulk of the footage looked like a preview for a new MMORPG.

The other day, Yahoo! Movies put up the new 3 minute trailer and I must say, this new one is a different story all together! I will start by saying that the visual effects are still very standard looking. It’s still hard to see the effects as the majestic revolutionary improvement that Cameron keeps promoting. So a lot of the footage still looks like something out of World of Warcraft, but for some reason, having a greater understanding of the story with it helps. In fact, at about 1 minute into the trailer, you’ll probably have a good understanding on what the story is about.

Here’s the flash version:

Now here is my concern. We live in a time where Hollywood has opened a pandora’s box of huge media marketing blitzes. We now have teaser trailers for teaser trailers! The film releases on December 18th and to me, there hasn’t really been a large marketing push on this film. I see the poster every single time I go to the theater, but rarely has the trailer been shown. Movie buffs know about it, but not everybody is a movie buff. The consensus I am getting is that the general audience knows very little about Avatar. We are at the tip end of October and reaching the start of November. 20th Century Fox has one month to get general audiences everywhere excited to see this film. Now, I’m starting to hear word spreading and I guess Avatar still could become a hit, but I perceive it’s chances as being limited.