M. Night Shyamalan Defends Avatar: The Last Airbender

M. Night. Shyamalan’s film adaptation to Nickelodeon’s award-winning Avatar: The Last Airbender (simply called The Last Airbender to avoid confusion with James Cameron’s Avatar) both was mocked and despised by fans and critics alike. Years later, it’s still ignored by the show’s creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante Dimartino (and probably those that helped make it).

When promoting his new Fox series Wayward Pines (also a book series) the director once hailed as the next Steven Spielberg went on the defense of the project when talked about adapting from source materials.

“It’s really weird because on the show the average age was, like, nine-years-old,” the director told IGN. “My child was nine-years-old. So you could make it one of two ways: you could make it for that same audience, which is what I did, for nine and 10-year-olds, or you could do the Transformers version and have Megan Fox.”

Shyamalan continued with explaining on why he went the direction of “it’s for the kids”. “Well, I’m going to make a movie about a kids show that my 10-year-old is watching and not make it for her. I make it for my guy friends. That felt like a betrayal of the innocence of the piece. In retrospect, is it too young to go out, it’s like what your intention is versus what they want it to be.”

He also insists that people do really love the movie, as well. “I go out and 10-year-olds are like, ‘That’s my favorite show! I love that movie!’ Parents come up to me and go, ‘They’ve watched The Last Airbender 74 times!’ Those kids, it’s for them. It was for them, to talk about mysticism and Eastern philosophies through a 10-year-old’s vernacular. So, you know, these are business propositions, which have very little interest to me, of like, ‘Hey, the business proposition is to get Megan Fox to be…’ You know, ‘You should age it ’til it’s that.’ That wasn’t the source material, you know what I mean?”

He then tries to compare The Last Airbender with Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise again. “Whereas, also, like a Transformers, it’s really fascinating, because it’s valid for Transformers. You know why it’s valid? Because it’s the little boys that were playing with them are grown up now. They’re the ones who wanted to see Megan Fox. That’s absolutely appropriate, you know what I mean?”

It’s been five years since The Last Airbender came out and I don’t think Shyamalan still understands why people didn’t like the movie. Currently, it stands at 4.3/10 on imdb.com and has a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Readers, were you a fan of the series? Did you like the adaptation? If you did, why?