It would seem that 20th Century Fox and James Cameron’s plan to hold Avatar Day this Friday has proved popular, with all tickets for the UK screenings of the 15 minutes of footage now snapped up by hungry film fans keen to get their first look at the 3D opus.
However there was some confusion initially in the UK due to the fact there’d been no news on how tickets would be distributed for screenings until a press release was sent out yesterday giving details. We’ve been hearing that there was disappointment for some UK fans as they were apparently still expecting to get their tickets through the avatarmovie.com website yesterday evening, as originally announced, only discovering too late that the film’s website was only handling US tickets, and not knowing about the seefilmfilm.com UK booking or having the necesary code, which had only been announced earlier in the day. Some even presumed that Avatar Day has become an America onlly event, because so many places had said avatarmovie.com was the place to be, when it turned out it wasn’t.
In the US demand was so high when booking opened at midday (PST) that at first the servers crashed over and over again, locking people out of the site and making it impossible for them to get their tickets. Indeed, if people in other countries were still expecting to get their tickets there, it may explain why the servers were so overloaded. However after a couple of hours, Fox got the problem sorted and people were able to book, with most screenings filling up incredibly fast, although a few screenings still had tickets left at the time of writing.
The next test is whether the actual footage will live up to the hype – after all we are only talking about 15 minutes of disconnected scenes.