This week, a major film opens in the US. Nothing unusual about that, but this one is unique. It has no stars, its plot is obscure, it has a made-up word for a title, it is told in a Mayan dialect and it has subtitles. Oh, and its famous director is most recently known for an anti-semitic outburst he unleashed this summer when stopped for drunk driving near his home in Malibu.
But the people charged with selling Mel Gibson's Apocalypto are bullish, taking advantage of the buzz they have constructed around the film and relishing the challenge served up by the action star-turned director's follow-up to The Passion of the Christ. "We never changed our opinion about our support for the picture and we never changed our approach," said Dennis Rice, vice-president of publicity at Disney, the studio distributing the $50m (£25.3m) film for Gibson's own Icon Productions.
"It's hard to say how many people will be able to separate their feelings about Mel the person and Mel the artist," he said. "There are many artists in the past who may not have been model citizens. I'm confident that the American people and the press have the ability to judge the movie on its artistic merits and judge Mel as an artist."
Oscar hopes
The stakes are high. Gibson's previous two films as director, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, found box office if not unanimous critical success. In a year when the Oscar race appears to be wide open, there are hopes that Apocalypto may gather the momentum needed for a slew of nominations if not statuettes come February.
And for Gibson, while a flop could be the end of his career, should the film succeed, all that nasty business in Malibu - what his friends term "the incident with Mel's personal life" - will be behind him.
The Passion of the Christ faced similar hurdles to Apocalypto: it too was a violent epic told in an archaic language, in that case Aramaic. The film, buoyed by an astute grassroots marketing campaign, went on to break box office records and earn its maker, who had borne the risk himself, an unprecedented return. It took more than $611m at the box office worldwide, but cost Gibson $30m to make.
"To me, The Passion of the Christ was the most unlikely blockbuster of all time," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations. "Apocalypto was always going to be a marketing challenge. Mel Gibson may be controversial, but the controversy sells."
The Passion, however, featured known actors and a familiar plot. Apocalypto has no such advantages.
Gibson and his advisers have chosen to mimic many of the lessons of The Passion in selling the new film, which is set against the disintegration of the Mayan empire in what is today Guatemala. While The Passion fostered audiences and built word of mouth support among Christian groups, the effort for Apocalypto has focused on forging ties with Native American and Latino groups.
"Dear Friends," began a letter from Gibson to members of the Los Angeles Latino Business Association, "Recently Latino leaders around the country were kind enough to attend a special screening of my new movie, Apocalypto. I am happy to say that their response was overwhelmingly positive."
But in the rush to reach a young Latino audience, it seems to have escaped the film's makers that contemporary Guatemala has been plagued by racism directed against indigenous peoples.
The marketeers' efforts appear to have paid off. In early November the Latino Business Association honoured Gibson with the chairman's visionary award at its glitzy Latino Global Business Conference. The award came after the group's chairman, Rick Sarmiento, had seen an early screening of the film.
Gibson also held screenings of early cuts of the film in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, areas targeted because of the concentration of Latino and Native American groups. Gibson and the film's lead actor, Rudy Youngblood, attended screenings and lunches with senior members of the Comanche and Chickasaw tribes, and conducted Q&As with audiences.
And rather than having a glitzy Hollywood premiere - which could run the risk of resurrecting the issue of Gibson's anti-semitism - the director attended a benefit for the Chickasaw nation in Oklahoma last Friday.
With word of mouth about the movie established among ethnic communities, Disney set about selling the film to a more traditional Gibson audience: young men. The film, which was finished only 10 days ago, played in colleges around the country last week.
Early reviews have been ecstatic, describing the movie as a Ben Hur for the modern age, and focusing on the film's centrepiece chase scenes. "But," said Mr Dergarabedian, "it's not a mainstream movie. I give credit to Disney for putting it out there, but it's certainly not poised to be $100m."