If you are both a subscriber to Empire magazine (which you should be) and someone who is excited about James Cameron’s upcoming film Avatar (which is debatable), you are in for a treat. The folks over at MarketSaw have received several scans from the upcoming issue of Empire showing off the Na’vi avatars at the heart of the upcoming sci-fi film, and boy do they look cool.

As our own Kevin Carr pointed out in his report from Avatar Day, the design of the Na’vi are “visionary” work of CGI. Sure, they look a little bit like cat people, but I think there is potential here for them to be really cool. As we are seeing, the Na’vi characters are less photo-real and more video gamey, but I think once we accept that fact we can move on and possibly enjoy the spectacle that Cameron is trying to create. Personally, I’m still very curious to see these things in action in IMAX 3D.

Check out the photos below, courtesy of MarketSaw and Empire.

Also making news today is Avatar ticket sales. Yes, months ahead of time tickets are already on sale for midnight showings. According to a THR report, AMC has begun selling tickets at more than 75 locations, most of which are IMAX 3D venues. The idea came from inside AMC, who decided that they would like to pre-sell tickets four months in advance after seeing strong turnouts for last week’s 16-minute IMAX previews on “Avatar Day.” However, the film is still without a running time, meaning they will only be able to sell tickets for midnight shows, as screening times beyond that will still be unknown for a while.

According to the report, the running time of Avatar will be between 2 1/2 and 3 hours.

Can you imagine watching an IMAX 3D presentation for 3 hours? Talk about eye strain…