We're finally getting the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie we deserve
Film Features Avatar: The Last Airbender
We’re finally getting the Avatarverse content we deserve.
On Wednesday, Nickelodeon announced during ViacomCBS’ Investor Day presentation that it’s launching Avatar Studios, a new division focused on content related to the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend Of Korra.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the first project under Avatar Studios will be an animated theatrical movie that’s set to begin production this year—so you can pretend that the M. Night Shyamalan movie was merely an awful fever dream now that we’re getting an official movie. But don’t get too excited just yet. No details have been shared, so we’ll have to wait to see what direction they’re taking with it.
A:TLA creators and executive producers Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko gave a statement to EW, sharing their enthusiasm towards the opportunity to expand the beloved Avatarverse:
“It’s hard to believe it’s been 19 years since we created Avatar: The Last Airbender. But even after all that time, there are still many stories and time periods in Aang’s world that we are eager to bring to life. We are fortunate to have an ever-growing community of passionate fans that enjoys exploring the Avatarverse as much as we do.
And with this new Avatar Studios venture we have an unparalleled opportunity to develop our franchise and its storytelling on a vast scale, in myriad exciting ways and mediums. We are exceedingly grateful to [Nickelodeon president] Brian Robbins and [president of Nickelodeon Animation] Ramsey Naito for their enthusiasm and respect for the Avatar property and us as its stewards. From the start, they’ve supported our ambitious plans and created a positive, proactive environment for us.
We’re excited to be back at Nickelodeon where Avatar began, doing what we do best in the biggest way possible. We can’t wait to build the great teams and productions to make all of this fantasy a reality.”
This news comes after DiMartino and Konietzko dropped out of Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series because they didn’t have control of the show’s creative direction. But now, with Avatar Studios, fans can be assured that any future animated content related to the Avatarverse is in great hands.
94 Comments
i agree that we probably do deserve this
Joaquin Phoenix, in full Firelord Ozai costume: “You get what you fucking deserve!”
I wonder what made Nickelodeon do a total 180 on this. When Korra was airing, they did everything they could to bury it.
Avatar became one of America’s favorite shows thanks to Netflix last year. There’s money in this now.
Yep… if my kids are any indicator this will be a hit on Nickelodeon.
My 11yo son just discovered Avatar and Korra last summer. I watched the last half of season 3 with him, since he was so into it. And holy damn, it was excellent! I was really impressed.He’s probably watched each of the two series 3 more times since then. And he’s gone on to consume a shit-ton of YouTube vids about the Avatar-verse, like which historical Avatar did what to whom yadda yadda. He was every bit as assiduous about consuming what there was to consume, as he was about Star Wars “explainers” or MCU “explainers”.It’s terrific that the original creators are expanding on it. That’s really great.
Netflix, and Nickelodeon being okay with queer protags now.
Yeah, in cold hindsight Korra’s biggest problem was that they were just a decade too early to tell the stories they were trying to tell there.
Korra is a brilliant show when it comes to her character arc (tied with Zuko’s as the best in the Avatar verse, fight me) and has excellent adult characters, but I think its actual biggest problem is that the crew making it didn’t know how much they were gonna make so they couldn’t easily plan out a full coherent story as well as Last Airbender could; they figured it out with Korra herself but not so much with her already weak teen peers.
They kept getting renewed. The original plan was a 12 episode miniseries about Korra and an animated movie focusing on Zuko’s mother
Ayup. Shifting plans make it really hard to develop on anyone but the main character’s journey, and even that is difficult if you don’t know how long you’re getting, it’s honestly astounding that Korra (the character) has such an awesome four-part story. She’s the inverse of Zuko: both have arcs about overcoming their issues with pride, but Zuko’s is about working through his shame and Korra’s is about working through her hubris.
And developing Korra’s compassion and seeing different perspectives. Hotheaded stubborn people always think they’re right and don’t want to be challenged. Ironically all her major enemies wanted reasonable things (equality, spiritual connections, freedom, order) but went to extremes to achieve them.
It’s also a show that, in aiming at a more mature tone and subject matter, including a lot of politics and complex world-building, really fell flat on its face. A lot.
Korra consistently had villains whose motivations and actions were rooted in serious grievances about how their world was run, which suggests a more complicated ‘maybe they aren’t entirely wrong’ kind of resolution to these stories, but the writers (and their heroes) persistently failed to grapple with those problems. Like, the narrative kind of neglects issues like ‘what does it mean to be a non-bender in a world dominated by benders’ after bringing them up…. and then also undermines the motivations of the Equalizers or have the ‘anarchist’ anti-government Red Lotus be as cynical and evil as possible. And this dovetails with an intractable story-telling problem: the Avatar’s inner circle – the most powerful people in their world – must ultimately always, even if they falter, be proven correct or right in the end (a problem it shares with BSG, oddly enough). Not to mention Korra’s weirdly regressive fascination with hereditary power structures, compared even to Avatar, and in a show seemingly in love with modernity and upending the status quo (shades of Star Wars there…)
None of this, I think, was done maliciously – it was just confused and sloppy and hamfisted. And can’t be explained away entirely by bad scheduling and production issues.
Well, I for sure think the bad scheduling is responsible for not doing much more with the Equalists at least, given they thought they had to wrap the story up quickly and didn’t know where to go with the material from there (imagine if they knew they could stretch that story out and make Amon a Fire Lord level of big bad), but I agree that it comes across as sloppy.
In terms of hereditary stuff, that’s confusing to me compared to your criticism of “we’re right you’re wrong” (which is valid and common in children’s shows). Season 2 was all about blowing up the notion that powerful bloodlines are necessarily good (Aang’s parenting suffers because he focuses so hard on his only airbending child) or necessary at all (Korra breaks off from her past lives but still saves the day). She then upends the power structure of the entire world by restoring its connection to the spirit realm, removes hereditary necessity from bending lineages by untapping airbending potential in people from all over the world, and completes her arc by understanding that the Avatar’s role is to maintain balance rather than just be a my way or the highway cavewoman. The only redeeming part of the shitty Earth King character they introduce in Season 4 is that he realizes how dumb a hereditary system of government is and dismantles the system that allowed the Earth Queen and her predecessors to be so corrupt. In my mind the show was all about questioning hereditary power structures and I’m really interested in why you think the opposite.
I’m not sure I’d agree that it was generally pro-dynastic politics: the Earth Kingdom under Queen Hou-Ting was pretty un-subtly depicted as hopelessly corrupt and moribund (a through-line from the original series) and about the worst thing you could say about how that plotline paid off was that they were maybe a little too starry-eyed about the possibility of a sitting monarch voluntarily instituting liberal democracy. And I’m curious how the Red Lotus came off as cynical to you: my main complaint with them was that other than Zaheer they were all largely cyphers, but I felt like the show went out of its way to demonstrate that not only was he a true believer but that he was centered in himself enough to master esoteric techniques easily.In general I felt like S3 and S4 were on a much better footing here than S2 and especially S1: “monarchies are bad but attempting to institute anarchism by just blowing stuff up and assassinating authority figures is not a great plan” is not, all things considered, an indefensible position to take.But yeah, how they handled the Equalists was a weird whiff. Okay, so Amon was actually a crime lord bloodbender, but he had thousands of eager followers including the most powerful industrialist in the country and they just never touched on why that might be other than that apparently the dude in the mask was very convincing?
“fight me”Nope. You hit it, dead on. Korra’s biggest problem from a writing perspective was that each season was written as if were probably the series finale. They were unsure about being allowed to continue. Whereas Avatar had a clear 3 year arc and Nickelodeon was confident enough to let it happen.
would be more than a decade early if they hadn’t tried, though.
While I personally like the legend of korra and don’t deny that korrasami was huge in its time, I don’t think that was the focus of the story and it definitely wasn’t planned to happen from the start. In my opinion Korra’s biggest problem was how Nick kept trying to kill it, that and some inconsistent writing and politics.
I asked Janet Varney at a ComicCon panel when she learned that Korrasami was the endgame, in terms of how she played the character, and she wasn’t told until the beginning of the last season. So yeah, definitely not something they were always building up to. (Which is more than okay, just agreeing that it wasn’t the overarching focus of her story; honestly it’s even better that it wasn’t, normalizing queer relationships is better than putting them on a pedestal for woke points at the cost of othering them from a straight “default.”)
Nickelodeon has dropped the ball many times over the years but fucking with the Korra production and release situations was awful and unprofessional. They did Mike and Bryan dirty with a show they poured everything into in the span of 5 years
Viacom’s been throwing money at every IP in their subsidiaries’ portfolios with some semblance of a devoted fanbase for the past few months in search of potential killer apps for the Paramount+ library; I have to imagine this news is just the Avatar folks being the latest beneficiaries of that approach, regardless of what Nickelodeon may or may not think about it (perhaps scaled-up somewhat in this case due to the recent increase in evidence that this particular fanbase is *really* devoted).
My guess is that they saw an opportunity to grab the ball Netflix was fumbling.
Interesting, Nick absolutely bucked Korra to the point of dropping it on some website nobody cares about, however that was a different time where original content on streaming services wasn’t as big, especially not animated content. Now we have Infinity Train, Castlevainia, the Adventure Time specials, and more.Tons of potential for the world and story, whether it’s based on a past avatar or a new story from an avatar we already know. A lot of people want adult Gaang, but I am wondering how far they will go with the fanservice. Korra did a pretty great job with it, even though some people are upset about Sokka and Suki’s lack of roles, it wasn’t the Gaang’s show, so they didn’t need to be too prevalent.Feel kinda bad for Netflix, who’s big budget live action series will most likely not get nearly as much hype as this new animated movie made by the creators. Though I’m still in the camp that Avatar does not need a live action remake since I really doubt it will improve upon muchHowever, if Nick gets to big for it’s britches and decides to make it’s own streaming service to host this and all their other shows and it costs like 10 dollars a month I will not be interested
However, if Nick gets to big for it’s britches and decides to make it’s own streaming service to host this and all their other shows and it costs like 10 dollars a month I will not be interestedYou don’t know about Paramount+, do you…?Viacom creating their own streaming service is the only reason Avatar Studios exists.
But what about MY CABBAGES?!
The new movie is a remake of Falling Down starring the cabbage merchant. He’s finally had enough.
I think one of the weakest parts of Korra as a show was that they never really got into why the Equalists were a popular movement and why there was widespread resentment of benders among baseline-humans, and the obvious way to deal with this is a six-episode miniseries where the cabbage vendor finally has enough and turns into an anti-bender vigilante.
What is there to explain though? The Have-Nots are always going to be resentful of the Haves.
This explains why Aang was resentful of the man who had all the cabbages.
…wow, dude. I’m gonna need you to put down and back away slowly from that dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged, ok?
I got to say I only really dug Season 2 of Legend of Korra. The rest of it was a bit too interested Korra’s emotional well being, while Season 2 was a bunch of “OH SHIT!!!!” moments. And Varrick was the fucking bomb that season.
That’s ironic. Book 2 is the most critically panned among all the avatar seasons by the fandom. Korra was a whiny b%#h throughout and the art suffered in many episodes because of the workload Studio Mir had they even had to outsource episodes to Studio Pierrot(famous for their work on anime such as Bleach, Naruto, Black Clover, etc.)Even more ironic Book 2 took the longest to produce. About 2 plus years lmao
Book 2 is the worst season that they’ve ever come up with.
The origin story for the first avatar saved it from being a dumpster fire.
Yeah I never got that. Korra was only like a whiny bitch when she broke up with whatever his name is. And then it was like “Cool, relationship over. Don’t have to deal with that anymore.”I recall her dealing with way more emotional baggage in seasons 3 and 4.
I thought her character arc was well done. I don’t understand why people hate unlikeable characters. Unlikeable characters have the best character arcs and dialogue. They even become likeable down the road like Mako
Indeed
If you haven’t seen the legend of whorra on YouTube.. Check it out. Hilarious and also helped me put a finger on exactly what my problems with the show were. Biggest issues were korra being an unlikeable and unchanging protagonist, and the setting change just not being good.
Wow, yeah, let’s get right on watching a video with a cool and not at all dudebro-y title like that, mmhmm
It’s crude but still the best critique of the series I’ve found
Varrick was the bomb, though. But that’s the funny thing about season 2 — of the two major plots, one had a lot of promise but had a one-note villain, while the other one had an interesting villain but the actual story only makes sense if multiple characters have had off-screen lobotomies.
I have my likes and dislikes for Book 2. The music was good, I even liked the character design for Unalaq, but his motives were really extreme. And it was even revealed he was behind the failed kidnapping of Korra when she was a kid. What type of uncle tries to kidnap their niece?
Book 2 has its moments, but it’s pretty weak overall. And to be fair, as far as ‘evil relatives’ go, I think Firelord Ozai still has that one beat.
I liked Ozai. He was a bastard but he could back it up in combat. If it weren’t for the avatar state he would have murdered Aang
Absolutely. He didn’t put on airs, he didn’t try to pretend there were convoluted reasons for why he did what he did. He was just an absolute menace and deadly as hell.
And he inherited an empire of bigotry and intimidation. He was a great character. Sometimes the best characters don’t have motivations or tragic backstories they’re just extreme pieces of shit and I love it lmao
I know some people love Korra, but it was a complete mess to me, which makes me a bit wary of this. Some of the most prominent writers on Avatar went on to make The Dragon Prince for Netflix, which captures Avatar’s spirit so much better than Korra did. It makes me wonder whether those other writers were at least as important to making Avatar work as Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were. And without those other writers, I worry this will become a “careful what you wish for” situation.
“The Dragon Prince for Netflix, which captures Avatar’s spirit so much better than Korra did”By what, having the characters waste an entire season in one location to buy time and plot that isn’t always relevant? The pacing of The Dragon Prince post first-half season one has been glacial.Korra was always driven by character, and sometimes characters, like people, are all over the place. Avatar’s characters are for the most point lovely but it’s blatantly obvious this was a kid’s show written with kids in mind and the maturity levels of nearly every character relfected that.
Same. I did not love Korra as much as TLAB. It felt uneven to me.I drifted more heavily into Adventure Time and Steven Universe at that point too.
Uh no. The Dragon Prince is good. I’m glad we’re getting four more seasons. Korra is awesome. Strong antagonists, great character depth, world building and story arcs.
Korra is highly overrated. Book 1 is solid standalone. And book 3 is decent. They have some interesting characters, and it was great to see a bi character done in a subtle and natural way rather than having it poorly written into the viewer’s face under the pretense of social awareness. Pro bending was cool. Advanced forms of bending being common was cool. Seeing the air nomads trying to rebuild was a cool idea though it could have been done better.But overall I found it messy. There was no overall arc like the fire nation threat of ATLA to keep continuity… Except Korra herself. But Korra never really changed (or at least constantly reverted to her old ways instead of growing), yet suddenly at the end is suddenly revered as a perfect avatar. The entirety of her character is “I’m cocky, now I’m scared of something and realize I’m not invincible, now I’m cocky again.” The whole spirits thing was overdone and weird and S2 was barely watchable. The setting was the most unique and wonderful part of ATLA and they essentially threw that away for a sudden jump into modern society. The love triangle was a mess and distracted from real character development (unlike ATLA which gracefully and maturely handled it’s romance). It isn’t without it’s pros, but it just doesn’t hold a candle to ATLA. While they are very different shows, they still draw comparison. And Korra just feels like a heavy-handed and inconsistent attempt to make a sequel to ATLA targeted at teens.
Book 3 of Korra was excellent, though. But yeah, other animated shows captured the Avatar spirit more.
A lot of the reasons Korra was a mess came down to production/scheduling issues. It started as a limited even series, then got its episode order bumped up, then was renewed unexpectedy after production had finished for one more season, then that happened again after season 2 for two more seasons. Its easy to see why that hamstrung any ability to make a satisfying narrative throughline or even a well paced show.
I feel like it’s a bit of a reach to call Korra a “mess” (disclaimer: I loved most of the show). The show certainly had issues with trying to introduce nuance into its villains and then completely dropping said nuance as the seasons reached their conclusions, but I don’t know that beyond that I’d go so far as all that.
I’d love to see them make an Avatar Kyoshi show.
Same, but then again I’d listen to Jennifer Hale read the phonebook.
The Kyoshi novels are terrific, if a little short, but damn would they ante up the mature rating for the show; they feature stuff like an Earthbender slowly pushing a ball of rock through a man’s chest and out from the other side.
I’d love there to be long scenes of the Avatar’s companions agonising about whether they can justify using violence to stop the antagonist, only to realise Kyoshi’s already dropped a mountain on him.
Got to admit, at this point if I was in charge of this franchise I’d make everything SO DAMN GAY. Korrasami nudged the door open, now let’s go full Steven Universe on this bad boy!
Apparently the rule in animation now is that you can make it gay as you want so long as you don’t actually say the word “gay”.
Doesn’t make sense to me either, but whatever!
Yep. The context is what matters. Sailor Moon was more blatant and the localization/scene cuts did not help.
The hilarious thing is that even as a kid I wasn’t fooled. Yeah, they refer to Uranus and Neptune as “cousins”, but every scene of them together still rates a gay-pointe-gay on the Gay Scale. Considering what did make it to air, they might’ve been better off just not saying anything one way or the other.
Except Kipo.
Steven Universe got so wonderfully gay in the end, and Adventure Time officially hoped on the rainbow making Bubbline official. HBO Max gave the AT crew a lot of freedom to let Bubblegum and Marcy have a full blown domestic relationship. I hope SU returns with HBO Max specials too.
I want more stories about the adults. Learning about their silly grudges and unresolved family problems really helped to show how there is more to life than just winning against the villains.
Apparently the rumor is that the Netflix adaptation is making Katara the elder sister, and the same age as Zuko? Which I’m taking to mean they’re trying to push the Zuko/Katara thing—ughh—but also that they completely misunderstand the importance of Katara being the “mother” of the group while being younger than Sokka.
They are probably aging everyone up so it’s less “kids in an adventure” and more “sexy teens on an adventure”
I’d be fine with them aging everyone up, but (per the unsourced rumor, mind you) Sokka’s younger now. Aang’s the same age he was before?
MY CABBAGES!!!
To be fair, the M. Night Shyamalan version was probably the version we deserve. We are terrible people and deserve punishment.
So true
bdsm in da av club comment section
I wish I could say that you’re wrong, but…
So there’s going to be an Avatar movie and a live action Avatar show? But the creators of each like, hate each other?
Hopefully another network will make a romcom about the two different creative teams eventually realizing that they secretly love each other
Ending in a Who Framed Roger Rabbit style cartoon/live-action mash-up?
Wait. So someone is trying to build a freeway that connects Netflix and Paramount+? Did I understand that correctly?
They do? Honestly, that might make the shows more interesting, like the Katzenberg vs Eisner feud. Except way smaller scale.
I didn’t get the impression that Konietzko/DiMartino hate the Netflix show, they were just frustrated with creative differences; I wonder if this being on the horizon had something to do with them leaving.
Is this that project that Diko walked away from because they wouldn’t agree to only cast POC actors?
No that’s the Netflix live action one that’s also still happening.
The further we go into this world, the further we realize it was probably best left as that beautiful point in time we can look back and cherish.See: Star Wars, and…well, a LOT of fucking media properties, honestly.
There’s too much money to be made. And the fan demand for avatar has only grown since Korra ended. The comics sale really well too
I think as long as they either go far into the future or far into the past—leaving the ATLA and Korra timeframes untouched—it could work.
I’m shocked they are willing to trust Nickelodeon again. Be careful.
Well they have creative control now and Paramount money so why not? Avatar Studios has their names written on it
Deserve? You mean it’s going to be even worse than that other one?
I mean, I hope it’s good. The whiplash of Nickelodeon here is a bit stunning. But if they suddenly started drinking the cactus juice, I guess it’s better not to question it?
It’ll quench ya!
I’d like to see an original Avatar born with the third eye and that fucking hellacious laser-zap power. They’d really have to deal with being a social outcast – and deal with a power that, as portrayed so far, bends toward evil.
Apparently the third eye is just a tattoo, and combustionbending is a subset of firebending. So it’s possible that any Avatar could gain that ability.
Thank you. Combustion Bending. I had forgotten it’s actual aspect.
Not gonna lie, I’d turn evil immediately if I had that power.Or any of the powers in these shows, really.
Netflix: “oh shit we can make money on this… ‘avatar’ show? Get me the creators”Brike: “yes hello we can make you a show but we need creative freedom or it’ll be bad”Months laterNetflix: “ok I like it but i want more Monday and viewers. Let’s change like 60% of it and add more romance, violence, and nudity”Brike: “nah dawg we’re out”Nickelodeon: “please come home and make us more money”