It looks like James Cameron is going for the tight-lipped PR approach for Avatar, and the Todd Solondz school of misanthropy might be supplying one of its finest graduates for the next Spider-Man villain

I’m a sucker for getting caught up in the hype for big blockbuster sci-fi movies that know exactly how to market themselves in order to look like the coolest thing since Ripley took out the xenomorph queen in Aliens. But so far the online publicity for Avatar, James Cameron’s forthcoming 3D megalith, hasn’t quite got under my skin. Far more exciting was the 15 minutes or so of actual footage that I saw earlier this year at the IMAX Waterloo in London. OK, so Cameron’s creation, the planet Pandora, did have a certain new-age whiff to it, with all those elfin, blue Thundercat types running around, but it was lurid, visceral and vivid enough to make you want to reach for the Peter Gabriel albums (and I’m a Peter Gabriel fan).

So far Avatar’s online hype machine has been limited to an OK teaser trailer and a pretty crappy website for supposed human recruits to travel to Pandora (which has admittedly improved somewhat since I first wrote about it last month).

The first full-length trailer is due to hit the web tomorrow, but an “international” version with unidentifiable subtitles is already available online, and reports are that it’s virtually indistinguishable from the English-language equivalent that’s about to drop. In the film, Jake (Sam Worthington), a disabled former marine given the chance to walk again via an alien body, or Avatar, which he can control with his mind, is charged with infiltrating the indigenous population of Pandora, the Na’avi, in order to help some evil military-industrial complex types plunder the priceless local mineral deposits. This new version appears to confirm a rather obvious story twist: it looks like Jake goes a little native and turns on his former employers.

There’s also a new featurette, which is mostly just Cameron waxing lyrical about what a genius Cameron is, while various other members of the cast and crew also make with the vapid hero worship, though it does contain a few shots we’ve not yet seen of Pandora.

For all the admittedly impressive motion capture involved, the technology, the ambition and the excellent cast, which includes the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi and Zoe Saldana, Avatar’s success will ultimately be predicated on its storyline, which right now looks like a pretty generic one that we’ve seen before in countless movies. Let’s hope Cameron includes a few further twists in the tale to shake things up a little.

Elsewhere this week, more rumours are leaking out about Spider-Man 4, Sam Raimi’s forthcoming return to the world of everyone’s favourite wall-crawling superhero type. This time the Evil Dead director is up against it after the critics turned on the series’ last outing, Spider-Man 3, due to its confused plot and multiple villains. The suggestion is that only one bad guy will feature this time, with Dylan Baker, always good value in unusual roles in movies such as Todd Solondz’s Happiness, looking likely to get the nod in the form of Spidey’s old enemy, The Lizard.

Baker already appears in the series as Peter Parker’s sometime tutor and mentor Dr Curt Connors, who in the original comic books is transformed into the reptilian supervillain, so the move makes plenty of sense. And while the New York-born actor doesn’t immediately come across as having the charisma of a Willem Dafoe or an Alfred Molina, who played the villains in the series’ celebrated first two instalments, he’s a class act who more than deserves the shot at a headline role.

What are your thoughts on this week’s stories? Are you getting excited about Avatar yet? And can Raimi turn round Spider-Man, which incidentally also looks set to be shot in 3D? Is Baker the right man to play the series’ next villain, or should a better-known actor be brought on board?

The Heath Ledger factor and Terry Gilliam’s cult appeal have combined to lure hefty Italian audiences into The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Even with the presence of the late Heath Ledger in his final performance, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus always looked like it might struggle to recoup its $45m budget. Gilliam’s films, after all, have something of a habit of haemorrhaging cash, and the movie struggled to find a distribution deal in the US. But the former Python can rest assured that his film is, at the very least, wildly popular in Italy.

Variety reports that Parnassus took a whopping $2.7m in its first weekend there, enough to put it at No 2 on the box-office chart. Distributors had clearly underestimated the appeal of a bit of fantastical Gilliam whimsy, for the film only screened in 227 cinemas. It will expand to more than 300 from this weekend to cope with demand, but the meagre number of screens available for viewers wanting to see the film meant that it scored the country’s third-highest per-screen average of the year, an impressive $11,870 for each cinema.

Gilliam’s film, the tale of a travelling theatre company which offers audience members the chance to enter a fantastical world beyond its dusty curtain, is also faring decently in the UK, where it entered the chart at No 3 with a bow of £905,000 two weekends ago. The prospects therefore look a little better for the film’s US debut on Christmas Day, though so far it is only being tested on limited release there.

Roberto Proia, head of Italian distributor Moviemax, said Ledger’s huge fanbase had undoubtedly helped Parnassus to achieve success in Italy. “We also found out that teenagers massively love Gilliam, and we did not expect this,” he said. “He really has rock-star status.”

Gilliam’s most successful box-office take is his $57m haul for 1995′s science fiction thriller 12 Monkeys. His last film, 2006′s fantasy drama Tideland, however, took just $566,000 across the world.

The Heath Ledger factor and Terry Gilliam’s cult appeal have combined to lure hefty Italian audiences into The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Even with the presence of the late Heath Ledger in his final performance, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus always looked like it might struggle to recoup its $45m budget. Gilliam’s films, after all, have something of a habit of haemorrhaging cash, and the movie struggled to find a distribution deal in the US. But the former Python can rest assured that his film is, at the very least, wildly popular in Italy.

Variety reports that Parnassus took a whopping $2.7m in its first weekend there, enough to put it at No 2 on the box-office chart. Distributors had clearly underestimated the appeal of a bit of fantastical Gilliam whimsy, for the film only screened in 227 cinemas. It will expand to more than 300 from this weekend to cope with demand, but the meagre number of screens available for viewers wanting to see the film meant that it scored the country’s third-highest per-screen average of the year, an impressive $11,870 for each cinema.

Gilliam’s film, the tale of a travelling theatre company which offers audience members the chance to enter a fantastical world beyond its dusty curtain, is also faring decently in the UK, where it entered the chart at No 3 with a bow of £905,000 two weekends ago. The prospects therefore look a little better for the film’s US debut on Christmas Day, though so far it is only being tested on limited release there.

Roberto Proia, head of Italian distributor Moviemax, said Ledger’s huge fanbase had undoubtedly helped Parnassus to achieve success in Italy. “We also found out that teenagers massively love Gilliam, and we did not expect this,” he said. “He really has rock-star status.”

Gilliam’s most successful box-office take is his $57m haul for 1995′s science fiction thriller 12 Monkeys. His last film, 2006′s fantasy drama Tideland, however, took just $566,000 across the world.

Most weeks nowadays, there’s a vampire film from some corner of the globe. This week, there are two, one of a certain merit from the States, the other an execrable British film (Colin). The American film, Cirque de Freak, is handsomely mounted and relatively ambitious in trying to reinvent the genre by juxtaposing life-enhancing vampires with death-dealing “vampaneze” through the story of two Los Angeles teenagers who join different sides. Based on a series of books by Darren Shan, it’s infinitely more inventive than the sweetly romantic Twilight books aimed at the vulnerable jugulars of teenage girls and clearly intended to launch a new cinematic franchise. It is, however, a rather muddled affair redeemed by striking performances from John C Reilly, Michael Cerveris and the imposing Ken Watanabe.

Peter Bradshaw ffinds that tales of adolescent blood suckers are beginning to pall

Another week, another tale of adolescent blood-sucking, neck-chomping folk. This one’s based on the first of the Vampire Blood Trilogy, a bestselling teen fantasy-adventure by Irish author Darren Shan. Chris Massoglia plays Darren and Josh Hutcherson is his friend Steve, two high-school friends who are intrigued by the arrival in their boring small town of the so-called “Cirque du Freak”. They show up to this creepy freak show, and get drawn into a secret world of vampires and weirdos – and Darren enters the eternal night of vampirehood, populated by exotic exquisites played by John C Reilly, Willem Dafoe and Salma Hayek as a bearded lady whose any-time-o’clock shadow sprouts when she is in a state of emotional turmoil. Tod Browning’s Freaks were the real thing. These are strictly CGI and the teen-vamp pose is beginning to pall.

Independence Day director’s new blockbuster shows fulfilment of supposedly apocalyptic Mayan prophecy

Prepare yourself for the end. Or at least, prepare yourself for a rush of films, books and heated discussion inspired by the purported Mayan prophecy that armageddon will arrive on 21 (or perhaps 23) December 2012. But film director Roland Emmerich, who directed Independence Day, is getting in early with his latest blockbuster, 2012, set for release next month. The trailer’s voiceover solemnly intones that “mankind’s earliest civilisation warned us this day would come”, against a backdrop of Mayan pyramids silhouetted against the peaceful jungle. Within seconds, the Sistine chapel comes crashing down and a tidal wave engulfs a Tibetan monastery. “Find out the truth,” concludes the trailer.

As it happens, there is no agreement among the foretellers of doom as to what will happen in 2012 and how we should respond. There are survivalists focused on building bunkers in their cellars and stocking up on supplies. There are those who believe we are hurtling towards a “circumpolar rainbow bridge”, which will establish global telepathy as the main form of communication. Others talk of a meltdown of all the world’s computer hard drives and a return to a world without electronics.

But all these predictions have one thing in common: the assertion that the longest of the many interlocking Mayan calendars – known as the Long Count, which starts at the mythical moment of the creation of the world of men – is about to reach its final point.

The “2012 phenomenon” is the result of a partially deciphered hieroglyphic inscription on a piece of stone in southern Mexico, known as Monument 6. “Monument 6 contains the only hieroglyphic reference to the date anywhere in the Mayan world, and it is where all this hullabaloo comes from,” says Guillermo Bernal, researcher at the Centre of Maya Studies in Mexico’s biggest university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The inscription foretells the descent to earth of the god Bolon Yokte on the Long Count date of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u. The next part of the inscription – the bit that might be expected to describe what Bolon Yokte will do – has been destroyed, but since this is a deity associated with war, who plays a key role in the ending of one world and the beginning of the next, most analysts have assumed it didn’t outline a plan for the doling-out of sweets. Hence the interpretation that the announcement of his coming is a warning that the end of the world is, as they say, nigh. “But,” Bernal points out, “there is no other Mayan inscription that even suggests the calendar doesn’t continue beyond there.” He is convinced that the excitement around the idea of a Mayan doomsday actually has more to do with the lingering influence of European medieval mindsets than it has with Mayan thought and cosmology.

Which rather raises the question of how the future is perceived by the modern Maya, who still live in southern Mexico and central America. They maintain some of the old customs, adapted over centuries since the great city-states of their ancestors mysteriously collapsed in about AD900. Valerio Canche, a Mayan priest, says: “Man has been working hard to destroy nature, and maybe it will all get much more intense in 2012 and there will be no going back. Then again, it might turn out to be a time in which we realise what has been done and take another route.”

In other words, the world might end. Or it might not. Either way, Canche doesn’t see much point in getting all worked up just yet. “We will plan what we are going to do,” he says, “when we get a better idea of which way things are going.”

• 2012 is released on 13 November

Independence Day director’s new blockbuster shows fulfilment of supposedly apocalyptic Mayan prophecy

Prepare yourself for the end. Or at least, prepare yourself for a rush of films, books and heated discussion inspired by the purported Mayan prophecy that armageddon will arrive on 21 (or perhaps 23) December 2012. But film director Roland Emmerich, who directed Independence Day, is getting in early with his latest blockbuster, 2012, set for release next month. The trailer’s voiceover solemnly intones that “mankind’s earliest civilisation warned us this day would come”, against a backdrop of Mayan pyramids silhouetted against the peaceful jungle. Within seconds, the Sistine chapel comes crashing down and a tidal wave engulfs a Tibetan monastery. “Find out the truth,” concludes the trailer.

As it happens, there is no agreement among the foretellers of doom as to what will happen in 2012 and how we should respond. There are survivalists focused on building bunkers in their cellars and stocking up on supplies. There are those who believe we are hurtling towards a “circumpolar rainbow bridge”, which will establish global telepathy as the main form of communication. Others talk of a meltdown of all the world’s computer hard drives and a return to a world without electronics.

But all these predictions have one thing in common: the assertion that the longest of the many interlocking Mayan calendars – known as the Long Count, which starts at the mythical moment of the creation of the world of men – is about to reach its final point.

The “2012 phenomenon” is the result of a partially deciphered hieroglyphic inscription on a piece of stone in southern Mexico, known as Monument 6. “Monument 6 contains the only hieroglyphic reference to the date anywhere in the Mayan world, and it is where all this hullabaloo comes from,” says Guillermo Bernal, researcher at the Centre of Maya Studies in Mexico’s biggest university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The inscription foretells the descent to earth of the god Bolon Yokte on the Long Count date of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u. The next part of the inscription – the bit that might be expected to describe what Bolon Yokte will do – has been destroyed, but since this is a deity associated with war, who plays a key role in the ending of one world and the beginning of the next, most analysts have assumed it didn’t outline a plan for the doling-out of sweets. Hence the interpretation that the announcement of his coming is a warning that the end of the world is, as they say, nigh. “But,” Bernal points out, “there is no other Mayan inscription that even suggests the calendar doesn’t continue beyond there.” He is convinced that the excitement around the idea of a Mayan doomsday actually has more to do with the lingering influence of European medieval mindsets than it has with Mayan thought and cosmology.

Which rather raises the question of how the future is perceived by the modern Maya, who still live in southern Mexico and central America. They maintain some of the old customs, adapted over centuries since the great city-states of their ancestors mysteriously collapsed in about AD900. Valerio Canche, a Mayan priest, says: “Man has been working hard to destroy nature, and maybe it will all get much more intense in 2012 and there will be no going back. Then again, it might turn out to be a time in which we realise what has been done and take another route.”

In other words, the world might end. Or it might not. Either way, Canche doesn’t see much point in getting all worked up just yet. “We will plan what we are going to do,” he says, “when we get a better idea of which way things are going.”

• 2012 is released on 13 November

I don’t buy US reports of a new trilogy for George Lucas’s space opera, but with Star Trek having been successfully rebooted, could Star Wars ever return to former glories?

Like millions of others, I grew up on the Star Wars movies. I remember being taken by my dad to see The Empire Strikes Back at the cinema when I was about seven years old and falling into rapture as I witnessed the spectacularly vivid, hugely ambitious vision on the big screen. As a child, it had far more verity for me than my own everyday surroundings, which seemed pretty humdrum when compared to all those epic battles across the vast distances of space.

There have been some great movies on a similar tip over the past 10 years or so which have sent the hairs on the back of my neck pointing outwards in much the way Empire did, but the most recent Star Wars films were not among them. Right up until the end, I held out a little hope that some of the magic of the earlier trilogy might be rediscovered by George Lucas and his team as they ploughed their way through a second triptych in workmanlike fashion. But around six months after Revenge of the Sith had been released, I finally had to admit to myself that the three later films should never have been made.

Since then, matters have spiralled into even more of a fug at Lucasfilm, with the most recent Star Wars big-screen venture, a teaser for the new animated series, meeting with critical and commercial apathy. This from a series which stands as one of the highest-grossing of all time, behind only Harry Potter and James Bond. A live-action TV show is also on the way, anticipation for which is not exactly at fever pitch. Meanwhile, Star Trek, always Star Wars’s nerdier, cheaper sibling, has emerged with a new fire in its belly following JJ Abrams’s enormously successful reboot.

It therefore strikes me that right now might not be quite the apposite moment to start planning an all-new trilogy of Star Wars films. But that is exactly what the Marketsaw blog says is happening at Lucas HQ.

“I have been hearing rumblings … extremely quiet at first, but now heating up significantly and from a trusted source – that George Lucas is preparing to unleash another Star Wars trilogy upon us, this time in stereoscopic 3D,” squeals the site’s editor. “This is not the TV series, these are brand spankin’ new 3D Star Wars movies.”

Marketsaw goes on to suggest that the films might be directed by such Hollywood luminaries as Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola rather than Lucas. It also contends that the existence of the new movies depends almost entirely on the success of James Cameron’s forthcoming Avatar, the science fiction 3D megalith that arrives in December.

Now if this story is true, it would be the scoop of Marketsaw’s young life. Naturally, then, many of the other more established US movie blogs have spent a fair bit of time doing their best to pooh-pooh it. Ain’t It Cool News went so far as to contact Lucasfilm, which predictably said that it is not considering future Star Wars live-action films.

That statement does not preclude the possibility, however slight, that the story is true. Lucas has already shown that he is more than happy to pillage his own past successes in the name of future profit, time and time again. Ultimately, he has a business to run, employees to pay, and Star Wars is by far his greatest asset. Put it this way, if you were Lucas’s bank manager, you’d probably be fairly astounded at the idea that there might not be future Star Wars movies.

Putting aside the matter of the Marketsaw report’s truthfulness (and I accept that’s a pretty big ask), the interesting question here is how Star Wars might be made great again. If a new series was filmed, should it take the form of a remake, or a completely new trilogy of stories, perhaps based in a different era of the saga’s invented history? The latter seems to me to be the best course of action: there is simply no way to better the earlier films, and even Lucas would surely not be fool enough to attempt such a feat.

It goes without saying that the series creator would really be better off waiting at least a decade or two before embarking on any new big-screen venture, but if Star Wars must come back now, it’s vital that younger directors with fresh ideas be appointed. Though no spring chicken these days, I’d pay good money to see a Peter Jackson-directed trilogy. Ditto one by Abrams, or even Joss Whedon, who did a great job on the similarly themed Serenity. The Dark Knight’s Christopher Nolan is interested in science fiction – his forthcoming film Inception is set to venture into the genre, and he knows how to craft a series that’s classy and meaningful, without losing the blockbuster clout.

But Coppola? This surely has to be a joke? The 70-year-old director has regularly describes himself as being on a belated journey into art-house territory, the sort of films he apparently wanted to make before The Godfather.

Most importantly, for a new Star Wars series to be successful, Lucas would have to let go of it altogether from a creative standpoint. Yes George, we know it’s your baby, but you really have done your utmost to kill off everything that was ever special about it. So if you must insist on bringing it back, you might want to consider taking a nice long holiday somewhere that doesn’t have a telephone or internet access while someone else gets on with the job. Because that, to my mind, is the only way that anybody might risk setting foot in a cinema showing a new Star Wars film, again.

From James Cameron to the Wachowski brothers to Steven Spielberg, US film-makers are paying homage to a groundbreaking Japanese anime – the movie that gave us today’s vision of cyberspace

When Larry and Andy Wachowski were pitching The Matrix to their producers, they played them a DVD of an 82-minute Japanese cartoon and said: “We wanna do that for real.” The film was 1995′s Ghost in the Shell, which defined a visual identity for cyberpunk cinema and counts James Cameron and Steven Spielberg among its most high-profile fans.

As it turned out, The Matrix wasn’t quite Ghost in the Shell “for real”, but it is indebted to it. Both films explore the virtual realm with a combination of existential questioning and kick-ass violence. The Wachowskis borrowed many of Ghost’s key details, including the digital “rain” of green numbers that signifies cyberspace, and the way humans plug themselves in through holes in the backs of their necks.

While he has just rereleased a “2.0″ refurbishment of his 15-year-old film, director Mamoru Oshii is modest about its pioneering qualities. “I did not revise it because I was dissatisfied with the original, but to prove how far we have progressed since then,” he explains. A cheerfully taciturn man with a penchant for basset hounds, Oshii doesn’t like to talk about the Matrix and any similarities to his film. “I’ve been asked this question hundreds of times. Frankly, it gets a bit annoying. I’m sure the Wachowski brothers feel the same. It is an entertaining movie, but I prefer their debut, Bound.”

Adapted from a comic book written by Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell possesses many hallmarks of the anime (Japanese animation) genre: vast metropolises, lovingly detailed robots, military hardware, pneumatic women with huge eyes. The story is a future-noir thriller along the lines of Bladerunner, following a female cyborg detective on the trail of a mysterious hacker. She also questions her own identity: does she possess a “ghost” or a soul? Is she just a machine?

Surprisingly, the film was co-financed by a British company, Manga Films, an offshoot of Island records. Andy Frain, the movie’s executive producer, says: “I wanted to do a blend of east and west: western storytelling combined with Japanese artistry and a great soundtrack – we were talking to Massive Attack at one point.” But his suggestions were largely ignored, he says. The critics were lukewarm, and the film only reached a sizeable audience on video and DVD.

But it did appeal to an influential contingent of film-makers. James Cameron has described Ghost in the Shell as “a stunning work of speculative fiction . . . the first to reach a level of literary excellence”. (His forthcoming movie Avatar envisages a future in which humans can transfer their personalities into the bodies of an alien species. Sound familiar?)

Ghost in the Shell’s influence on Spielberg, another fan, is clear in AI: Artificial Intelligence, which ponders the philosophical implications of the human-automaton interface, and in the future-tech visions of Minority Report. In April this year, Spielberg’s Dreamworks studio acquired the remake rights to Ghost in the Shell; he plans to make a 3D live-action version.

In the past year, we’ve also had Joss Whedon’s enjoyable TV series Dollhouse, in which secret agents are wiped clean of their memories and personalities, so as to be implanted with new, temporary ones. And the sci-fi film Surrogates, out last month, imagines a future in which people prefer to stay at home and control avatars of themselves in the outside world.

But Ghost in the Shell went further than its Hollywood counterparts. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner, the techno-slaves of The Matrix or the robot in AI, Ghost’s cyborg heroine does not seek to regain her “lost” humanity. Without giving away the ending, the film hints at the start of a brave new post-human era (or is it a Buddhist parable?) about the surrender of self into a larger entity. Quite a burden for an 82-minute cartoon.

This ramshackle fantasy starring the late Heath Ledger is like a moth-eaten wizard’s robe, but director Terry Gilliam should still be applauded for insisting on casting his own spells