Last month I reported on a Twitter-induced rumor that a new trailer for Iron Man 2 would be running this holiday season in front of Sherlock Holmes, which is due out Christmas Day. And after much digging, it turns out that my intuition was right.

Paramount Pictures has confirmed for me this week that the trailer for Iron Man 2 will be attached to Sherlock Holmes. For me, this settles the debate on whether or not a new look at the Jon Favreau directed film will be attached to Avatar. And it makes sense, as Paramount and Warner Bros. (distributor of Holmes) have long had a solid relationship, whereas Avatar is a Fox release. And nobody plays nice with Fox.

The other potential reason for Iron Man 2 to be previewed with Holmes is that the detective story is tracking extremely well across the board. As Jeff Wells pointed out yesterday, the tracking on Sherlock Holmes shows that it could very well destroy Avatar in December. The total awareness and ‘definite interest’ scores for Holmes are off the charts when compared with Avatar, especially in the female under-25 and male/female over-25 demos. This simply means that Holmes is going to play to a broader audience, whereas Avatar will play hot with a much narrower audience (you know who you are).

And as Iron Man was a broad-audience success story, releasing a trailer for the second film with Holmes seems… well… elementary.