New Avatar 2 Images Are Extremely Revealing
James Cameron's Avatar debuted back in December 2009 to gonzo success. The film's $2.782 billion box office take helped legitimize IMAX, solidifying the specialty medium as a viable outlet for scads of big budget filmmakers.
And yet, people joke about Avatar and how it doesn't loom as large in the memory as similarly successful worlds like the MCU, Star Wars, or even Harry Potter. While that may hold some water, the franchise is chugging ahead. James Cameron has been talking about an Avatar sequel since 2006, three years before the first Avatar was even released into theaters, and while Avatar 2 didn't meet its originally-planned release date of December 2014, we still find ourselves six years later reporting and reading about every drop of news concerning the sequel.
If for no other reason than the deep, abiding need to know whether or not Avatar can succeed again, our eyes collectively remain focused on its coming successors. We were most recently supposed to see Avatar 2 in December 2021, but as the result of the novel coronavirus, the film has been delayed again to December 16, 2022. In the meantime, we did recently receive some news that gives us insight into the technological future of Pandora.
Avatar 2 and the untold depths of Pandora's abyss
So much of Avatar's narrative universe is split between the nature and vistas of Pandora and, in contrast, the technological world of the Earth organization RDA (Resources Development Administration). RDA, you may recall, is the group responsible for mankind's ransacking of the Na'vi, their resources, and their world.
The first Avatar film focused on Jake Sully and the tech that allowed him to integrate himself with the blue, alien Na'vi, and it was mostly land-bound, with a focus on trees and their sacred power. There's more to Pandora than that, however, which is where our latest news comes in.
Fresh from the official Avatar Twitter feed, we were shown, courtesy of producer Jo Landau, our first look at "The Crabsuit: A human driven multi-function submersible. One of the many new RDA vehicles that will be seen in the Avatar sequels."
As you can see from the two above images, the Crabsuit is human-driven and has at least two modes we can immediately see: A submersible version for deep dives and a version that can crawl like a crab. How much of the first Avatar sequel will take place underwater is unknown, but it could be a substantial amount. If the Na'vi can connect with creatures who fly, there's no reason they couldn't do the same with creatures who swim. Plus, if we take into account the evolution of underwater effects we've seen since the DCEU's Aquaman film, there's every reason to assume Cameron — who found underwater success early on with his film The Abyss – and Landau will be able to show off an oceanic world the likes of which we've never seen before.