Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender Exec Talks Show’s “Mature” Appeal to Game of Thrones Fans

Avatar: The Last Airbender will be debuting its new live-action series with Netflix later this month, and the showrunner behind the series teased that this show “couldn’t just be for kids” and had to have a “mature” appeal for fans of Game of Thrones. Avatar: The Last Airbender is getting a new live-action adaptation taking on the classic animated series, and it won’t be too much longer before fans get to see how it all works out. As the new series premiere draws closer, those behind the scenes have begun to reveal their approach to this new take on the franchise. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender showrunner and executive producer Albert Kim previously opened up about how this new take on the series would have darker moments than what was seen in the original, and speaking to IGN, Kim elaborated on this idea further by discussing the balance of the tone for the series overall. Noting that while they wanted to stay faithful to the humor and spirit of the original animated series, the new series also “couldn’t just be for kids” as it also needed to “appeal to the people who are big fans of Game of Thrones.”

Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender “Couldn’t Just Be for Kids”

Noting that Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender had a “tightrope” to talk as they had to figure out what kind of tone they wanted to have, “I think that’s the essential tightrope that we had to walk, is figuring out, tonally, where this show lived, because you wanted to stay true to the original, which had a large component of humor, lots of action, lots of darkness too,” Kim began. Explaining that even as a Nickelodeon series the original animated show had darker elements that were especially prominent in the later seasons, Kim wanted to have more of that balance for this serialized version for Netflix. 

“So for us, it was about striking that right balance, of making sure you were true to the DNA of the original,” Kim explained. “But at the same time, we had to make it a serialized Netflix drama, which meant it couldn’t just be for kids. It had to also appeal to the people who are big fans of Game of Thrones. And so, it had to feel grounded and mature and adult in that way too. So that’s, like I said, the tightrope that we have to walk.”

But that’s also why Kim has been noting this is a “remix” of the original series, “I’ve used the term that this is a remix, not a cover, in that you’ve got to hit a lot of familiar notes, but you can’t forget that this is supposed to be a new song. So obviously, there are story points and characters that you have to do fairly faithfully from the original. But at the same time, you’re literally translating something from 2D to 3D, and that meant dimensionalizing the story, taking it into new places, filling in some of the gaps.”

It won’t be too long before we get to see this new take on Avatar: The Last Airbender as it will be premiering with Netflix on February 22nd. What are you hoping to see? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animation and other cool stuff @Valdezology on X (formerly known as Twitter)!

HT – IGN