For the past week, whenever I’ve opened up TikTok and scrolled through my For You page, between the cooking recipes, action figure reviews, Marvel Rivals clips, and more ship edits of The Pitt than you can shake a stethoscope at, there has been a clip, or an edit, or a reaction to a scene from The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender.
I scroll past them every time (trying to indicate that I’m not interested hasn’t worked, either, probably because I still scroll and watch Last Airbender and Korra content regardless), mostly because I am very excited to see the movie when it releases later this year in October. But they keep coming, born of a leak of clips last weekend that turned into a full-on dumping of the entire movie online this past Monday.
Artists behind the unreleased film have spent all week on social media begging fans to stop pirating the film and disseminating clips out of respect for their work. Behind the scenes, Paramount has purportedly launched an investigation as to how the film got out of its hands and onto the internet, but it’s otherwise maintained the same level of radio silence about The Legend of Aang it has had practically since the film was announced.
It’s been a very weird time to be an Avatar fan—the strange mix of shock and excitement that inescapable bits of the film have been shown off and look exciting, tempered with the fraughtness of the way those looks have come about. And then there’s the frustration that Paramount was disrespecting the franchise by both allowing the film to be leaked in the first place and then being slow to react to those leaks, on top of the lingering bitterness from the film’s shift to streaming.
But that bitterness didn’t start with The Legend of Aang. If anything, the mess that has befallen the movie is just the latest in a long road of ignominies Avatar has faced. Even as The Last Airbender was one of Nickelodeon’s biggest shows while it was airing in the mid-aughts, Paramount decided the logical follow-up was to completely bastardize it for M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action movie, itself littered with a series of controversies over its adaptive and casting choices even before you get to its general quality.
It was there again with the way that the studio treated The Last Airbender‘s successor, The Legend of Korra. That goes for Nickelodeon’s initial skepticism that a female lead could headline an action cartoon to the abrupt way the last chunk of the show’s third season and all of its fourth were moved online first instead of being broadcast on television. That it’s taken another decade-plus for Paramount to realize the potential of the franchise after Korra‘s ending on any form of screen—in part thanks to Last Airbender getting its own streaming renaissance elsewhere, sparking Netflix’s own, much more warmly received live-action series spin on it—only continues that feeling that the studio has little idea of how to really leverage the creatives and studios that have forged some of the best animated television of the 21st century, even now.
It’s that uncertainty that again brings us back to Legend of Aang. The move to streaming after being announced as the opening flurry of an animated feature future for Avatar, alongside new shows, still stings—with the leaks this week, some fans have even used that decision to support further sharing clips and the movie online as a form of somewhat-misguided protest. Even beyond the embarrassment of the leak, the fact that it’s the most that’s been shown of the film, illicitly or otherwise, six months before its release (outside of some random t-shirts that represented our actual first look at the film) speaks again to that uncertainty that the people who own Avatar just don’t understand what they’ve got, in either the franchise or the people that make it.
And yet the thing about Avatar is that it endures and thrives in spite of it. Wherever Legend of Aang is released, the reaction to it so far (even if it’s a reaction we shouldn’t have yet) has been positive. There’s still Seven Havens to come as well, carrying on Last Airbender and Korra‘s legacies in TV (unless Paramount finds some way to get in the way of that, too). Avatar still has a bright future, as it always has—and the respect of its creatives and its audiences, which counts for much more than the disrespect its executive owners have shown it over the years.
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