Netflix made clear its intent to create a live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender years ago, with occasional information in the form of casting for the first season’s various characters. Things really began to kick into gear earlier this year as the streamer planted the show’s flag for a 2024 release, and now the first real trailer is here to show you what all the fuss is about.
The setup, for those who didn’t watch the 2005 Nickelodeon animated series, goes something like this: in a world where people control one of the four elements—water, earth, fire, or air—the Avatar has the ability to control all of them. One hundred years after the Fire Nation has effectively conquered the world, an Air Nomad kid named Aang (Gordon Cormier) is discovered by Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley), a pair of Water Tribe kids who soon realize they’ve made friends with the Avatar. The only hope of taking down the Fire Nation’s ruler Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim) is for the trio to travel the world looking for masters that can teach Aang how to properly bend the non-air elements—and avoid being captured by Ozai’s son, the banished prince Zuko (Dallas Liu).
Avatar was previously adapted in 2010 by M. Night Shyamalan and was… kind of a mess! The fear of a repeat hangs over this new adaptation, which hails from Sleepy Hollow and Nikita showrunner Albert Kim. Netflix managed to strike gold with its One Piece adaptation from a few months back, but Avatar is its own distinct thing and with its own set of expectations that it’ll have to live up to.
Also starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Ken Leung, and Elizabeth Yu, Avatar: The Last Airbender will hit Netflix February 22, 2024.
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