The guy in charge of Netflix’s live-action Avatar addresses losing the original creators

Netflix, as part of its ongoing campaign to create new versions of already-popular things that it can own outright, has spent the last several years developing a live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender. And, as we get closer to the release of the thing on February 22, it’s looking to be a bit more faithful to the original cartoon than the M. Night Shyamalan movie version from 2010. But it won’t be faithful enough for Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, the original creators of the animated series, who left the Netflix project back in 2020 after determining that it would never be what they had “envisioned or intended to make.”

Writer Albert Kim is the remake’s showrunner, and in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he finally addressed the departure of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s original creators. He said you’d “have to be an idiot” to not be “intimidated” by the idea of making Avatar without the guys who created Avatar, but he also said that his first reaction to the opportunity was “Hell yeah!” followed quickly by “Holy shit! Do I really want to do this? Is there a way to improve upon the original?” He evidently decided “yes,” or at least “maybe,” because he is making a new version of Avatar: The Last Airbender, so he clearly thinks there’s something to be gained from it.

We don’t know exactly what inspired Konietzko and DiMartino to leave, which is to say that we don’t know what’s so different about this version from the other version, but Kim did mention to Entertainment Weekly that the live-action show starts in a different way from the animated one and that it was a “conscious decision to show people this is not the animated series.” He also said they chose to “unravel storylines and remix them in a new way to make sense for serialized drama,” which could be the sort of thing that might rub someone the wrong way. We’ll know how it goes in February when the show premieres on Netflix.