Netflix’s The Last Airbender live-action cast photos prepare fans for Avatar cold war

The 2023 edition of Netflix’s Tudum fan event gave way to every possible fandom-friendly banter and IP flex, even if there wasn’t much to watch. At the center of the event: The most basic appearance at the streamer’s upcoming live action Avatar: The Last Airbender, which has been in the works for half a decade. Promising to re-follow Avatar Aang and his friends Katara and Sokka in their quest to unite four elemental nations by defeating the conqueror Fire Lord Ozai, Netflix’s The last airbender put in the spotlight with a teaser – or maybe more of an atmosphere check? – which showed off the symbols for the Water, Earth, Fire, and Air tribes, as well as depictions of the four protagonists in costume.

The Tudum segment also revealed that the show would premiere [waves hand] in 2024. That’s 366 potential drop dates — it’s a leap year, baby! – for Avatar: The Last Airbender. But for die-hard Airbender fans, it’s also a year away from the return of the original Aang gang to screens. Things can get weird.

Netflix first announced plans for a live action Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2018, and at the time, it felt like a coup: Original creators Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko would return to oversee what they saw as a “reimagining” of the Nickelodeon animated series, which unlike the M. Night Shyamalan movie version, would try to do justice to the identities of the characters. “We can’t wait to bring Aang’s world to life as cinematically as we’ve always imagined, and with a culturally appropriate, non-whitewashed cast,” they wrote in a statement at the time. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build on everyone’s great work on the original animated series and delve even deeper into the characters, story, action and world-building.”

The music to the fans’ ears quickly died down when the theoretical work began. But two years later, DiMartino and Konietzko resurfaced to say they were leaving the project.

“To be clear, it wasn’t easy not getting our way,” Konietzko said in an Instagram post in August 2020. “Mike and I are very collaborative people; we didn’t need all these ideas to come from us. As long as we felt those ideas were in line with the spirit and integrity of Avatar, we’d be happy to embrace them, but we ultimately came to believe that we wouldn’t be able to meaningfully determine the direction of the series .”

DiMartino echoed the sentiment in a post on his personal blog, encouraging fans to give Netflix and the new creative team the benefit of the doubt on the final product. But he also made one thing very clear: “What I can be sure of is that whatever version ends up on the screen, it’s not going to be what Bryan and I envisioned or intended to make.”

Image: Netflix

Netflix and producer Dan Lin (The Lego movie), who originally brought in Konietzko and DiMartino, eventually found a new crew to take over the show, and one made up mostly of creatives of Asian descent. The version arriving in 2024 will show off Albert Kim (Sleepy cavity) as showrunner, with Michael Goi (River valley), Jabbar Raisani (Lost in space) and Roseanne Liang (Shadow in the cloud) directing the first season. The cast was also stacked: while Aang, Katara, Sokka and Zuko (Ozai’s son who haunts the trio for most of the show) would be played by relative unknowns, names like Daniel Dae Kim, Amber Midthunder, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Danny Pudi and George Takei all gave the show great credibility. But showrunner Kim, in his opening remarks about the new approach, overshadowed it all with a bit of skepticism.

“My first thought was: why? What could I do or say with the story that wasn’t said or done in the original?” he wrote on the Netflix blog in 2021. “But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. VFX technology has advanced to the point where a live action version can not only faithfully translate what has been done in animation, but also add a rich new visual dimension to a fantastic world […] Netflix’s format also gave us the chance to reimagine a story that was originally told in self-contained half-hour episodes as an ongoing serial story. That meant story points and emotional arcs that we loved in the original could be given even more room to breathe and grow.

Image: Netflix

As DiMartino said when he left the Netflix series, this could be a good thing. Damn, it could be great. Don’t mind the Live action remake of Cowboy Bebop there in the cornerthe Tudum teaser quietly urges, look at these decals here. But Kim’s debut and the company’s drive to reinvent Avatar: The Last Airbender with new technology is a reminder that Konietzko and DiMartino left because they weren’t doing what they wanted to do – and they left to go make more Avatar in their medium of choice.

In February 2021, Viacom, the conglomerate responsible for Paramount Pictures and Paramount Plus, announced the formation of Avatar Studios, a new home for Konietzko and DiMartino to create all Avatar-related content for any brands. Until then, the only expansion of the Avatar story has been the Nickelodeon sequel series The Legend of Korra, and the Konietzko and DiMartino-approved books and comics. Now there would be more – probably a lot more.

Image: Nickelodeon Animation Studio

Most of Avatar Studios’ plans are locked away in a spirit library buried under a desert, but the team’s first project is an untitled theatrical feature film from director Lauren Montgomery, whose credits include DC’s badass animated film. Wonderwoman movie, the Netflix Voltron series, the theoretical Spider Gwen Spider-verse spin-off, and of course many great episodes of it Airbender And korra. All we know about the movie is that it will feature adult versions of Aang and friends and that Paramount will be showing it in theaters in 2025. Airbenderyou’re probably pumped.

2024, Avatar: The Last Airbender is in competition with itself. Netflix and the creative team will create a show that fans would theoretically enjoy, with action-oriented storytelling and an emphasis on racially conscious casting. Meanwhile, the creators who made the original show what it is are trying to replicate that themselves, reimagining the rights and wrongs of that series for an ever-growing audience. Who will do well? What does it even mean? What is Avatar and is there room for so much of it?

Image: Netflix

Most franchises don’t have to deal with this – no one made alt-Star Wars when George Lucas returned to his prequel trilogy or when Lucasfilm was cracking down on an expansive movie universe. The creators of Star Trek have always passed the baton as the franchise jumped between film and television, each heir keeping canon in mind and keeping it tidy for the next crew. The MCU (with Sony’s rather connected-quite-no-chaos), the DCU (where the Snyderverse continues but is clearly over… but isn’t it?), and even Middle-earth (WB is making more movies to refute Amazon for their, hobbit -free prequel) feel like obvious parallels to a weird situation, but even then none of these realms have the original creators rubbing shoulders with well-meaning imitators.

The future of the Avatar franchise looks robust, but it’s broken. But maybe after years of rest that is exactly what this still mature series needs. Aang brought the Four Nations together to achieve harmony. Surely he can run a blockbuster-sized series and an animated tentpole at the same time? We’ll have to wait to really find out – for now, all the hype is limited to a few cast photos and some familiar decals.