Avatar: The Last Airbender fans got the best news of their lives in September 2018 when Netflix announced its plans to adapt the original animated series into a live-action series. But since then it’s been crickets concerning details about the series, and we were starting to get seriously worried about whether this miracle was actually going to happen.
Netflix didn’t welch on its end of the deal though, and now news about the upcoming series has finally started to trickle out. Here’s everything we know so far about Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action series.
The original series’ creators are on board as showrunners and executive producers. Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have signed on as showrunners for the series, meaning the great minds that brought us the original series will be shepherding the new adaptation too. That’s a weight off our minds!
Discover Your New Favorite Show: Watch This Now!
It’s rumored to go into production in early 2020. Though the series was originally slated to go into production in 2019, there have been no reports of filming getting underway. The voice actress who played Toph Bei Fong, Jessie Flower, recently spoke about the live-action series on Wyrd Crafts Chitchat Podcast, saying that the series will go into production in Canada in early 2020, potentially in February. Canada’s forest-y locations would make for a perfect setting for many of the episodes from the original series’ first book, Water.
The casting for the show will be just as diverse as the animated series. The failed film adaptation, The Last Airbender, got a lot of flak for whitewashing roles that were depicted with Inuit and Asian influences in the animated series. Luckily, DiMartino and Konietzko don’t plan to make that mistake with this series.
“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,” DiMartino and Konietzko said in a statement announcing the series. “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.”
(Disclosure: TV Guide is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of ViacomCBS.)
Avatar: The Last Airbender concept art