Why the ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Movie Was a Massive Disappointment

Various Avatar: The Last Airbender sequels and spinoffs are in progress, but fans are understandably wary after the disappointment of the live-action The Last Airbender in 2010. The M. Night Shyamalan movie received generally poor reviews and has only gotten worse criticisms in hindsight. Here’s a quick breakdown of why the movie failed, and why the upcoming endeavors face such a high standard.

The Last Airbender adapted the storyline of Nickelodeon‘s Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 1, but it took so many creative liberties with the source material as to become virtually unrecognizable. It followed the same general premise but it skipped some major plot points and spent too much time on others. It even made one massive change to the fictional art of “bending” itself — firebenders could not create their own flames.

Most of the criticism for these choices fell on Shyamalan himself, since he wrote, directed and produced the film. Many fans took issue with the casting choices as well, but even here Shyamalan seems to be the culprit. In an interview with PEOPLE at the time, he took credit for all the major casting choices except for that of Dev Patel, who replaced Shyamalan’s choice of Jesse McCartney.

The casting was extremely controversial because the world of Avatar is based heavily on Asian cultures, yet most of the main characters are played by white actors. Shyamalan only infuriated fans more by trying to defend this choice, telling The Washington Post: “Anime is based on ambiguous facial features. It’s meant to be interpretive.”

Other aspects of the movie factored into negative reviews — the special effects, the choreography and even the approach to advertising. In the end, fans generally disavowed the film and plans for a sequel were dropped. Avatar lives on in sequels and spinoffs, with many more animated and published projects in the works.

In the meantime, fans are extremely wary of an upcoming live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the works at Netflix. The adaptation originally included series creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko as executive producers, but they left the series, complaining that it was “whitewashing” the cast once again.

Thankfully, this doesn’t seem to be the case in a cast list leaked online this week. Still, many die-hard fans of the franchise remain more excited for the animated spinoffs than the live-action remake. DiMartino and Konietzko are now working with Nickelodeon again on developing more animated series in the Last Airbender universe. Their first project will reportedly be an animated film due out at the end of 2021.

Avatar also lives on in some very successful comic books and a burgeoning series of prequel novels by author F.C. Yee which explore the life of Avatar Kyoshi. With so many projects in the works, the Avatar franchise is bound to have some successes on the horizon. Stay tuned for updates on those productions as they become available. Disclosure: PopCulture is owned by ViacomCBS Streaming, a division of ViacomCBS.