(a) Change filmmaking forever

(b) Alter your brain

(c) Cure cancer

To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron or Fox.

Only a few weeks ago, Joshua Quittner, a technology writer for Time magazine, fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora, the morning after he was shown just 15 minutes of the film. Mr. Cameron, Mr. Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual “memory creation.”