Avatar: The Last Airbender is getting a live-action remake from Netflix

The popular Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender is not only getting a live-action remake, but it’s getting one from Netflix!

Am I dreaming? I think I’m dreaming. If I am, don’t wake me up because this is too good to be true! I firmly believe there are only four networks that can do a live-action Avatar justice and that’s HBO, Showtime, Starz and Netflix. I hoped for HBO so they can make a slightly more light-hearted Game of Thrones, but Netflix will do just fine. An entire generation grew up with Aang, Sokka, and Katara, and bad-boy turned good Zuko, your first animated crush (don’t lie).

Set in a fictional world where the population is divided into four nations: Fire, Water, Earth and Air, and each nation is inhabited by “benders,” people gifted with the ability to control their nations element. Not everyone in these nations are benders. One of the main characters, Sokka, came from a water tribe, and even though his sister is a water bender, he had no such powers.

The series focuses on an Avatar, a reincarnated soul reborn every generation, or whenever the last Avatar dies, who can control all four elements and is meant to maintain balance in the world.

Aang, the last airbender, is a twelve-year-old boy who was born in a world of peace. After he discovers that he’s the next Avatar, he runs away and becomes frozen in an ice berg. When he emerges he finds that the Fire Nation has started a World War with the other nations, believing themselves to be the superior race, and has already conquered half of the world in his absence. He may only be twelve, but he’s given the duty of stopping the war and mastering the elements in a few months’ time.

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It was a children’s show that detailed themes not commonly shown in children’s series’, including war, life and death, racial ignorance, self-acceptance, parental abuse, poverty, oppression, arrange marriages, sexism, female empowerment, genocide, redemption and sacrifice. Its characters were also of Asian heritage, another uncommon detail in a children’s show.

Created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, Avatar: The Last Airbender premiered on Nickelodeon in 2003 and ran for three seasons, ending in 2008. It spawned a comic book series and a spinoff television series, The Legend of Korra, which ran from 2012 to 2014. M. Night Shyamalan adapted the show into a live-action movie in 2010, The Last Airbender, but let’s pretend as it if that never happened. Of all the movies they’ve banned over the years for ridiculous reasons, they couldn’t band that crap!?

Netflix announced today, September 18, that their partnering up with Nickelodeon for a “reimagined“ live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender, with Konietzko and DiMartino returning to run the series. Konietzko and DiMartino assured fans that the characters won’t be whitewashed or changed into a different race like they were in Shyamalan’s film, and that the remake will dive even deeper into four nations.

"We’re thrilled for the opportunity to helm this live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. We can’t wait to realize Aang’s world as cinematically as we always imagined it to be, and with a culturally appropriate, non-whitewashed cast. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build upon everyone’s great work on the original animated series and go even deeper into the characters, story, action, and world-building. Netflix is wholly dedicated to manifesting our vision for this retelling, and we’re incredibly grateful to be partnering with them."

A quick trip to Twitter will prove how excited the fans are about this announcement. We’re all still upset about the end of Aang and Korra, and of the movie which somehow managed to mispronounce Aang’s name. I never understood that, how could they mispronounce the characters names? It wasn’t like they adapted a book and didn’t know how to say it. It was a series, we heard everyone say “Aang” a hundred times!!

Netflix has yet to announce when Avatar: The Last Airbender will premiere, but I’m going to guess late 2019 or early 2020.