Avatar producer shows off incredible crab-inspired submersible for long-awaited sequels

If James Cameron is going to probe the oceans of Pandora in the Avatar sequels, he's going to need the right equipment. Luckily, he's got it with the Crabsuit, a crustacean-inspired submarine, whose awesome design was revealed by series producer Jon Landau on Instagram.

He described it as "a human driven multifunction submersible. One of the many new [Resources Development Administration] vehicles that will be seen in the Avatar sequels." Voicing his own excitement, the producer added: "I want one!"

Check it out (and try not to get pinched by those crushing claws):

More than three decades later, Cameron continues to show that Aliens is still influencing his sci-fi mindset when it comes to hulking, mechanized equipment. The exo-suit that Ripley used to defeat the xenomorph queen in 1986 was the obvious progenitor of the Amplified Mobility Platform seen in the first Avatar, and it seems to have inspired the Crabsuit design as well.

Production on the Avatar movies resumed in June at a soundstage in Wellington, New Zealand, after a 4-month hiatus. Filming immediately picked back up after Cameron and Landau underwent a mandatory two-week period of government-supervised self-isolation. Since then, Landau has been sharing behind-the-scenes photos from the set. A few days back, he posted a photo of the gathered crew watching a sequence with "near-finished visual effects from Weta Digital."

Due to the production shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the follow-up features to 2009's Avatar were pushed off yet again. Avatar 2 is now scheduled to open in theaters Dec. 16, 2022, while the next three films in the franchise are slated to follow in 2024, 2026, and 2028, respectively.