While Fox seems to be pretty confident that young men will turn up in droves to see Avatar this weekend, there is still a lot of work to be done to try to convince women both young and old that they should skip seeing Sarah Jessica Parker in Did You Hear About the Morgans? and instead go see a movie about blue things in outer space. Hence, the Fox publicity team sent James Cameron to spend some time chatting with Hoda and Kathie Lee on the always kooky fourth hour of the Today show this morning. Sadly, Kathie Lee seemed to be properly medicated and didn’t try to challenge the HMFIC to see who could pound back a bottle of Chardonnay in the shortest time or anything.
However, Hoda did seem to irk Cameron ever so slightly when she referred to the Na’vi characters in Avatar as “the tall blue folks.†This spurred Cameron to take a bit of a critical potshot at the Fox marketing team for failing to get the word out to the fairer sex about his film. As he explained it, “I don’t think we’ve been able to convey the emotion [of Avatar in the trailers to women].†So if the film fails to deliver in the under-25 and over-25 female quadrants this weekend, you can expect that someone over on Pico Boulevard will be getting their butt chewed out come Sunday afternoon.