When it rains spinoffs of Avatar: The Last Airbender, it pours spinoffs of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Netflix is prepping a full-blown remake of the original Nickelodeon series, but this time in live-action. The prospect of seeing Aang, Katara, Zuko and the rest of the characters from this iconic animated series in live-action is exciting, but Netflix is doing it without the help of original series creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, who were originally attached but left the project partway through.
Instead, they’ve gone back to Nickelodeon and helped found Avatar Studios, which will be making a bunch of a new animated movies and TV shows set in the Avatar universe. We have an Avatar-off, and that’s without even bringing in James Cameron’s blue people. And now, we know what the first movie from Avatar Studios will entail.
The information was revealed over the weekend at San Diego Comic-Con. Avatar: Braving the Elements, an Avatar rewatch podcast hosted by voice actors Janet Varney (Korra) and Dante Basco (Zuko), got a panel to itself. While Varney couldn’t be there in person, she appeared via video to announce that the first Avatar Studios movie would be about “Avatar Aang and his friends.”
Danny Pudi reportedly joins Netflix’s live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender
That’s to be expected. Aang is the main character of the original show, after all; why wouldn’t a follow-up movie feature him? And there’s plenty of source material about him to adapt. While The Last Airbender ended way back in 2008, there have been comics about the further adventures of Aang and company coming out for years now. I imagine Avatar Studios will look there for inspiration.
As for the Netflix show, Avatar News is reporting that Community veteran Danny Pudi has joined to play the Mechanist, an Earth kingdom inventor displaced from his home by the military expansionism of the Fire Nation. He ends up helping Aang and friends by creating new technology for them.
We don’t know when either of these Avatar follow-ups are coming out. The Avatar-off sleeps…for now.
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