Albert Kim, who replaced creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, is handing over the series to colleagues Christine Boylan and Jabbar Raisani.
Sources say Kim’s intention was to lay the foundation for season one of Avatar: The Last Airbender after stepping in for the beloved franchise’s creators. Given the long turnaround time in crafting the series — Netflix ordered it in 2018, the creators left in late 2020 and the show didn’t debut until February 2024 — sources say Kim was ready to move on to new opportunities.
Co-executive producer Christine Boylan and exec producer/director Jabbar Raisani — both of whom were hired by Kim — will take over as the drama’s third showrunners for the previously announced second and third seasons.
I don’t think the show is salvageable.
I think critics are being a bit dramatic. ATLA Book 1 had bumps and slow episodes, and some very similar flaws people pave over looking back (like Sokka being a chick magnet).
I wouldn’t care if the issues where just bumps or some slow episodes. The problem is that the live action has some very fundamental issues like a glaring lack of character development and generally poor story telling, which are things the original excelled at.
Just watching the live action remake and trying to tune out the original as much as I could, I found most characters to be very flat and superficial. Combined with the often very cringy dialog I found it really hard to emotionally connect with or care about the characters.
I don’t understand why they can’t just film a 1:1 recreation of the animated show as live action. Why change anything other than the medium?
This applies to all of these animated to live action remakes. Just do the original thing in live action! Or make something original. Stop half assing both.
What’s the point of a 1:1 recreation if the original is right there?
The 1996 shot-for-shot remake of Psycho showed clear as day that nobody needs anything like that.
The live action version is far better than the OG. I think this bodes well for the future seasons.
That is a good joke. I laughed for a few minutes before being saddened.
They washed down literally everything that made the show good. All of the aspects are simplified to the point that it’s just a shell of itself. ATLA characters are actually pretty complex and have a lot of good interactions and growth together, which is terribly absent from the remake.
True. I still think the live Action is “salvageable” but in the eyes of 99% of people it will never be better than the cartoon (let’s be real here, personal preference is something subjective and some people will diverge from the majority in their taste).
It could be salvageable but it’s not offering anything better than the original in my opinion, which makes it not really worth it. It’s really hard to improve on perfection when you’re adapting and not just making something based on the source material.
It’s fun to see animated shows in live action but often they change from the source material either in an unfulfilling way or because they kind of try to find a middle ground nobody really wants. They need it to be quickly appealing to new entrants into the series, while also being familiar to the old fans, but the quick appeal usually takes away from what made it a fan favorite in the first place which disenfranchises the existing fanbase while never really appealing to new people.
Netflix also sucks as a content creator and host because they spin up and axe things like a rotary sawblade, so even if something is genuinely salvageable (I liked Cowboy Bebop) chances are it never even gets a shot. I would rather somebody take the source material and try a different approach, and that’s why I was into Bebop is that they pitched it as “a remix” and not a direct adaptation. When you don’t give a shit about alienating the existing fans you can actually try cool weird shit instead of just retreading the same ground over and over again.