When Netflix first announced it was bringing the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender to live-action, it was doing so with the help of the people who helped shape it in the first place: Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino. Then, two years later, they suddenly weren’t. And for remaining showrunner Albert Kim, that lead to some tough decisions.
“You’d have to be an idiot not to be intimidated a little bit,” Kim told Entertainment Weekly recently, in his first interview about running the long-awaited (and perhaps, in the wake of the last attempt to bring Avatar to a live-action imagining, long-dreaded) Avatar remake. “My first reaction after ‘Hell yeah!’ was ‘Holy shit! Do I really want to do this? Is there a way to improve upon the original?’ [after Konietzko and DiMartino left]. Whenever you tackle something that’s already beloved by millions of fans, you have to ask yourself those questions.”
Konietzko and DiMartino’s departure from the project in 2020 rattled Avatar fans already unsure about the prospects of adapting the series into a different medium again—even more so in the years since as we’ve learned that the duo have returned to working with Nickelodeon on developing new animated series and movies set in Avatar’s world. But for Kim, who had managed to work with the duo briefly before their exit from the Netflix series, it still represented a chance to deliver a new version of the series, to a generation of fans that didn’t exist when the original animated series first aired.
“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 said of his discussions with Konietzko and DiMartino. “This is Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it is our version of Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
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