‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ on Netflix: 4 Reasons Why We’re Optimistic (And 3 We’re Not)

There are a lot of elephant koi in this particular room, and Kim’s blog immediately dove into one of the biggest ones: Why does Avatar needs a live-action adaptation? “Flash forward 15 years. Netflix offers me the opportunity to develop a live-action remake of Avatar. My first thought was, ‘Why? What is there I could do or say with the story that wasn’t done or said in the original?,” Kim wrote. “A:TLA had only grown in popularity and acclaim over the last decade and a half, which is a testament to how complete and resonant a narrative experience it had been. So if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

The answer, Kim decides, is threefold. VFX has finally caught up to the animation of the original; an adaptation will allow him to expand stories and arcs; and a live-action Avatar will increase onscreen representation for a new generation, showcasing Asian and Indigenous actors. And honestly? He raises some good points. Giving a new generation of young fans an epic story to adore is a pretty great goal. Just the fact that Kim is going into this project questioning its existence is a really good sign.

Let’s get into one of those points Kim made. An Avatar adaptation will give certain stories and arcs “more room to breathe and grow.” There is a reason to worry about this promise, which we’ll get to eventually. But on its face, wanting to expand the world of Avatar is a noble and very cool goal.

Though it only ran for 61 episodes, Avatar: The Last Airbender covers a vast universe. Often the original cartoon did a great job of diving into a new nation or culture, telling a complete story, then jumping back out to return to its main narrative. But sometimes those jumps felt forced. If it’s done right, no one is going to complain about seeing more of the Kyoshi Warriors or the Ba Sing Se saga. Less intense story-of-the-week pacing will allow for that.

You can’t talk about Avatar adaptations without mentioning M. Night Shyamalan’s aggressively panned The Last Airbender. That film committed many cinematic sins, but its biggest one was its whitewashing. The world of Avatar is an incredibly diverse one filled with a lot more people than three miscast white kids. Based on our first look at this new cast, it seems that Netflix is trying hard not to make the same mistakes as its predecessor. Our new cast actually looks like the anime versions of Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko. Plus Gordon Cormier makes an adorable Aang, and Dallas Liu looks like the perfect Prince Zuko.

This goes back to Kim’s respect for the source material. Often when people look to adapt older properties, their first question is: how can I modernize this? That’s not a question Kim seems to be asking. “I didn’t want to change things for the sake of change,” Kim wrote. “I didn’t want to modernize the story, or twist it to fit current trends. Aang is not going to be a gritty antihero. Katara is not going to get curtain bangs. (I was briefly tempted to give Sokka a TikTok account though. Think of the possibilities.)”

That’s a huge relief. Half of the reason Avatar works is because of the chemistry of its leading characters. If you completely change, say, Sokka’s bad jokes to match the acidic comedy of the internet, it will throw off the entire balance. Hopefully, Aang will remain silly and optimistic, Katara will be a stubborn perfectionist, Sokka will be a logic-loving punchline, and Zuko will remain the biggest emo kid in history.

Back to those elephant koi, there’s still one Kim and Netflix haven’t mentioned. Last August Avatar‘s creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko quit the live-action series. In a post from DiMartino, the co-creator explained that they essentially left due to creative differences, which isn’t great. The last time someone tried to make an Avatar adaptation without these two we got The Last Airbender. So yeah. That’s a red flag.

Remember how we said there was reason to worry about giving the series more room to breathe? Here’s why. The rise of Netflix has brought about longer episode runtimes and, at times, longer seasons. Sometimes that flexibility helps, like in the case of Black Summer, a show that refuses to overstay its welcome. But it’s also led to some of the longest, most meandering additions to television, like the slowest of burns Bloodline, or Altered Carbon. We’re all for creative freedom, but sometimes it’s helpful to have actual limits. We all want “Zuko Alone”; but no one wants it last for 74 minutes — or, for that matter, to be broken up as the B-plot over several episodes.

Out of all the concerns for this adaptation, this one is probably least likely to be an actual problem. After all, television VFX have gone so far in the past few years. Look at Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, Loki. Heck, look at What We Do in the Shadows. But it’s also the worry that feels the most pressing. What if all the bending in the new Avatar looks bad?

Making bending look cool is deeply instrumental to the success of this story. If it looks awesome, you have an epic tale of one boy who’s literally able to master the elements to save his world. You have an immediate hero on par with greats like Luke Skywalker and Peter Parker. Get it wrong and you have a ton of adults bullying children over floating rocks. The Last Airbender burned us before, and it had a budget of $150 million. Here’s hoping it won’t happen again. Netflix: back up that money truck.