Netflix is remaking the animated Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender in live-action. The first season was released earlier this year, although it seems like a lifetime ago. The series has been renewed for seasons 2 and 3, meaning that the cast and crew should get a chance to tell the entire story, as there were also three seasons of the original show.
A lot of things changed in the transition from animation to live-action, including a compressed timeline and a tone shift. While the original animated series spared a lot of time for Aang and his friends to engage in low stakes misadventures, the Netflix show has fewer episodes per season and has to get a move on, so we often skip right to the grim stuff. After all, this is a story about a group of friends trying to fight a tyrannical fantasy empire, and the story just gets darker the longer it goes on.
Still, star Gordon Cormier (Aang) is hoping that season 2 of the Netflix show allows more moments of levity. "I feel like I had quite a bit of in our first season," he told ComicBook.com. "In Season 2, hopefully I'm going to get some more opportunities to be joyful and stuff. I mean, they're both really great (seasons) so you get to see both sides of Aang. In the original series, we got to see a lot of the super joyful and filler stuff, which is dope. But with, I don't know how many episodes, I'm just assuming that they're going to have to pack it together."
That might be tricky, since season 2 is arguably the darkest part of the path for Aang and the gang. But we'll see what happens when the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender hits Netflix.
Why Gordon Cormier admires One Piece star Iñaki Godoy
Netflix has a history of taking animated series and turning them into live-action shows. Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the streamer's most successful ventures into this space. Another is One Piece, starring Iñaki Godoy as would-be pirate king Monkey D. Luffy. It only makes sense that Cormier and Godoy would cross paths.
"I love Iñaki," Cormier said. "He's the best. I think he just turned 22. I saw his birthday post. He posts the same photo every single year with the same caption but changes the number. It's so sick. I wish I would have thought of that so I could hit, like, 11."
Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece both have second seasons in the works. We don't know when either is coming out, but we know that One Piece will almost certainly come out first.
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