When the world needed him most, he re-appeared. Just shy of 20 years after Avatar: The Last Airbender premiered on Nickelodeon, creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have announced not one, not two, but three new animated films in the works that will revisit the four nations and our gang of heroes trying to keep them all united.
It’s not the first attempt to revisit the magic bottled by that first animated series, which proved to be every bit as rich and rewarding for grownups as it was for the kids it was aimed at, but it might be the most promising. M. Night Shyamalan’s very bad live-action adaptation was quickly memory-holed, and now Netflix is trying to create their own live-action series — a series DiMartino and Konietzko departed from over creative differences.
But these new movies, which will be entirely separate from the in-development Netflix series (or James Cameron’s completely unrelated Avatar sequel [not confusing at all!]) will return The Last Airbender to its native world of animation, will be produced by DiMartino and Konietzko through their own Avatar Studios and at least the first one will be directed by original series veteran Lauren Montgomery. We don’t exactly know if these movies will revisit the adventures of Aang, Katara and the gang or the later developments fans saw in The Legend of Korra, but it’s nice to know this excellent franchise is in good hands.
