Fox Home Video held a global media day this week in honor of the April 22 release of Avatar on DVD and Blu-ray (just four months after its theatrical premiere). Journalists from all over the world were invited to check out scenes from the Blu-ray disc and talk with filmmaker James Cameron and producer Jon Landau about the process of putting it together.

At an airy mansion in the Hollywood Hills (rumored to be owned by the creator of Rock Star energy drinks), a blue carpet led up to an open patio where a plushly furnished tent served as a temporary theater, complete with dark blue curtains, comfy black couches and potted greenery. Cameron and Landau themselves hosted a presentation in which they showed off four clips from the film on a 103" monitor (flanked by two smaller 50" screens on each side of the audience).In his introduction, Cameron expressed his love for the "spectacular" Blu-ray format and explained that in order to keep the image quality as high as possible, no space was allotted on the disc for ads, promos or trailers. It will just be "pure movie.""If you have to make room for a lot of other content it's just going to degrade the image quality," Cameron told the audience. "That's part of it. Also, by the way, I have this kind of unwritten deal with Fox that anytime one of my movies makes more than a billion dollars we leave all the crap trailers off the disc. It's a little service we pass on to the viewer, because I can't stand watching them anymore than you can."The April 22 edition won't come with any special features either, although it will have a link to a portal where limited bonus content will be available. A special edition will follow in November with more extensive extras, including behind-the-scenes and making-of content as well as additional scenes available via an interactive branching feature."I think what we can expect in terms of extras in November is a documentary that really chronicles the filmmaker's journey through the four-plus-year odyssey of making this movie," Landau told us. "That really starts back from the inception of bringing on five artists to start working with us to start creating the world and culminates in the release of the film and what we went through there. I think we can look towards a behind-the-scenes look at how some of the visual effects were done, and revealing some of that. You know, going into the release of the movie, we felt that it was important to keep the wizard behind the curtain. And not to talk before the release about how the movie was done and let people just go experience the movie. I think the Blu-ray really affords the opportunity to delve deeper and give people choices about how they want to experience the film."Cameron and Landau explained the inspiration for the film's April 22 release date, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and an initiative to plant one million trees all over the world."So many people have responded, and different groups and different causes that are attempting to deal with environmental issues and issues on indigenous rights have come to us and really seen Avatar as a kind of focusing lens for all of these issues," Cameron said. "And I think the public has really felt kind of an emotional outpouring around the movie for these issues. So Earth Day is exactly the right time for us to premiere the discs."