Avatar: The Last Airbender boss was “intimidated” to remake the show without the original creators

The other month, Netflix dropped a trailer for its upcoming live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Nickelodeon’s beloved animated series about a young man — Aang, the titular last airbender — who must bring balance to a world at war. So far, it looks pretty good!

This show has gone through some drama behind the scenes. At first, the creators of the original animated series — Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko — were going to run things. But they left in 2020, saying they “couldn’t control the creative direction of the series.” DiMartino acknowledged that while “Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Avatar has the potential to be good,” it wouldn’t be the show he or Bryan Konietzko wanted to make.

That inspired a lot of doubt among fans; generally, it is not a good sign when the original creators of a work sign on to manage a remake, say “nope,” and then leave. Still, Netflix forged ahead, hiring showrunner Albert Kim (who’d worked on shows like Pantheon and Sleepy Hollow) to take over.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Kim said that it “absolutely” felt daunting to wok on the show without the original creators. “You’d have to be an idiot not to be intimidated a little bit,” he said. “My first reaction after ‘Hell yeah!’ was ‘Holy s—! Do I really want to do this? Is there a way to improve upon the original?’ Whenever you tackle something that’s already beloved by millions of fans, you have to ask yourself those questions.”

That said, DiMartino and Konietzko weren’t completely absent from the development process. Before they left, Kim was at least able to sit down with them for a long conversation about how to adapt the show into a new medium. “It ran the range of really nerdy little things that no one except for diehard fans might wonder about — questions about Katara’s mom or Aang’s parentage — to bigger picture stuff about how to translate what made the original so special into a live-action version,” Kim recalled.

That said, the bulk of the show was made without DiMartino and Konietzko on hand, so this will be a new version of the story. Or as Kim put it, “This is Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it is our version of Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

Netflix’s remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender will change the opening scenes of the show

So what’s different in the remake? Kim was up front about at least one change: “We don’t start the show the way the animated series starts,” he said. “That was a conscious decision to show people this is not the animated series.”

"We had to sometimes unravel storylines and remix them in a new way to make sense for a serialized drama. So I’m very curious to see what’ll happen in terms of reaction to that."

For the record, the first episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, “The Boy in the Iceberg,” begins with siblings Katara and Sokka trying to catch fish in their arctic homeland, getting off course, and stumbling upon Aang, who has been frozen in an iceberg for the past 100 years. He is the Avatar, the only person in the world who can control all four elements. After they break him out, adventure ensues. The original show gets right to the point. Maybe the remake will give us a bit more backstory?

But if you’re afraid that Kim and his team will change too much, you can at least rest that the lot of them seem to be fans. “The storytelling alone was just so epic and much beyond the audience it was targeted for,” Kim said of watching the show for the first time back when. He also likes that, unlike Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings — fantasy epics with medieval European overtones — The Last Airbender is inspired by East Asian cultures. “That was incredibly rare. It still is. A live-action version meant setting new benchmarks for representation by featuring an all Asian and Indigenous cast.”

“All of our writers are also fans of the original, so they drew upon their own personal experiences and the things that they love the best,” Kim says. “We made sure to include all those in the show.”

We won’t have to wait that much longer to see what Kim and his team have in store. The first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender — which runs eight hour-long episodes — drops on Netflix on February 22.

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