Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender Makes A Major Change For A Good Reason

Few adaptations can stay completely faithful to the source material, especially when the original is a classic animated series. Netflix's live-action "Avatar: The Last Airbender" is no exception. As showrunner Albert Kim told Entertainment Weekly, the live-action version needs to make one pretty significant change to stay on top of the story ... though it does have an extremely good reason for this.

"All three seasons of the animated series essentially take place in the course of one calendar year," said Kim. "There was no way we could do that. So we had to design this first season, especially, to accommodate the possibility of some time elapsing between the first and the second season."

As such, the show's not messing with the time frame of the story just for the sake of changing things. The potential for the characters to get visibly older has to be written in the show's DNA to accommodate the unrelenting passage of time. Unlike animated characters, actors age — and for a show like "Avatar: The Last Airbender," the inevitably lengthy production cycles between seasons mean that, say, main character Aang's actor Gordon Cormier — 14 years old ahead of the Season 1 premiere — would have a pretty tough time portraying a character with the appearance of a 12-year-old boy in the coming years.

Before Albert Kim took over, "Avatar: The Last Airbender" originally involved the creators of the animated show, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. However, they withdrew from the project in 2020 over creative differences, leaving people wondering whether Netflix's remake was dead on arrival, regardless of its quality. The timeline changes might be practical and well thought out, but they're nevertheless changes. As such, the issue may continue to cast a shadow over the project ahead of its February 22, 2024, release date, especially when you consider Kim's earlier comments about the show's faithfulness to the source material. 

"This is 'Avatar: The Last Airbender', but it is our version of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2023. In the same interview, he also noted that the live-action series starts differently from the original, and will make several other changes as well. "We had to sometimes unravel storylines and remix them in a new way to make sense for a serialized drama," Kim said. "So I'm very curious to see what'll happen in terms of reaction to that." 

Such changes may pile up. For instance, fans might wonder how the possibility of a significantly longer time frame will affect Sozin's Comet, the slowly but steadily nearing space object that will grant firebenders incredible power when it gets close to Earth. Unfortunately for fans of this particular aspect of the original show, the comet won't be making an appearance in the live-action series ... though Kim didn't rule out the possibility of its appearance in the show's potential future. "We removed that particular ticking clock from our show for now because we couldn't know exactly how old our actors would be for the subsequent seasons," he explained.