“Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender” ‘official’ first look — creators delve inside the movie ‘se-prequel’ (exclusive)

Nick RomanoTue, July 7, 2026 at 3:00 PM UTC

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Momo (Dee Bradley Baker) and Avatar Aang (Erin Nam) in ‘Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender’ official first lookCredit: Paramount+Key Points -

Creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko join director Lauren Montgomery for their first interview on the animated Aang movie.

The trio discusses revisiting the main characters as adults, the “devastating” leak, and this new era for Avatar.

“There is no other film like this in the American animation industry,” Konietzko tells EW.

Team Avatar is ready to talk about what they’ve been working on for the past five years, even if it’s not under the most ideal of circumstances.

In 2021, the Paramount-owned Nickelodeon announced the launch of Avatar Studios, a new division dedicated to expanding the beloved animated universe created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko through Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. In a world full of benders, each with the ability to harness one of the four natural elements, the Avatar — reincarnated each generation — comes with the power to master them all and maintain harmony.

The first successor project became Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.

Directed by a veteran of the franchise, Lauren Montgomery, this first feature-length film revisits the main characters of the original series now as adults.

“It’s always a challenge to write a sequel. A prequel is an even bigger challenge,” Konietzko tells Entertainment Weekly. “And a ‘se-prequel’ or whatever we’re gonna call it, this other third type is maybe the most challenging.”

Toph, Sokka, Momo, Aang, Katara, and Zuko in ‘Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender’Credit: Paramount+

More plainly, DiMartino says they were simultaneously making a sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender and a prequel to The Legend of Korra.

“The story we told in the series had a very decisive ending,” he notes. “We didn’t wanna retread stuff. We had told a bunch of stories in the comics. We weren’t really looking to adapt any of those stories exactly, but we had ideas of how the world had developed.”

As seen in EW’s official first-look exclusive, it’s been roughly 10 years since Avatar Aang (Eric Nam), waterbender Katara (Jessica Matten), boomerang-throwing Sokka (Román Zaragoza), Prince-turned-Fire-Lord Zuko (Steven Yeun), and earthbender Toph (Dionne Quan) united to end the Fire Nation war and usher in a new era of peace in the original show’s finale of 2008.

We call this the official first look due to recent developments. An anonymous hacker leaked the entire 90-minute film online back in April, and now a 26-year-old man in Singapore has been arrested for the incident, according to the country’s major paper The Strait Times. The leak spread rapidly as fans eagerly devoured the new chapter of the Avatar cycle, but for the creators, it came as a “devastating” blow, according to Montgomery.

“It was a dark day when we found out that that had occurred,” DiMartino says. “We were all pretty disappointed and frustrated and all the emotions. It’s just one of those unfortunate things that occur in your careers, in your life. I’ve been through a lot of them in various ways in my life, so it’s always a setback and disappointing.”

The leak came after the film, once meant for a theatrical release, shifted to a streaming rollout on Paramount+.

“We were trying to be like, ‘Let’s make the best of this new situation, let’s adapt to that,’ and then it got stolen, which was just very unceremonious and abrupt and a bit rude,” Konietzko says.

Now that it’s been some months, there’s a silver lining.

“At least for me, now that the film is ready to finally be out officially in the world, the excitement’s back,” DiMartino continues. “And I’m excited for everybody to finally see it in their homes, wherever they’re watching, with their friends. Hopefully people can recreate some kind of community experience because the big part about Avatar is the community.”

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender will now arrive on Paramount+ much sooner than expected on July 25, as confirmed by the first trailer.

“You can’t sweat what you can’t control, and we had no control over that. It happened to us,” Montgomery says of the leak. “So I think the only thing we can really take away from it is we know that we made a movie that we really love and we really believe in and it will speak for itself.”

Team Avatar as adults

Momo, Aang, and Katara in ‘Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender’Credit: Paramount+

According to DiMartino, when given the prospect of making an Avatar movie, one of their first decisions was to age up the Aang Gang.

“Lots of things changed along the way,” he adds, “but for it to feel different and a little more mature and grown up, aging up the characters made sense.”

A decade after the end of the 100-year war, the world is starting to heal. Team Avatar constructed Republic City, a main setting in Korra and the capital city of the newly founded United Republic of Nations, designed to promote unity amongst all four regions.

Aang is now around 25 years old and “at this precipice between adolescence and adulthood,” per Konietzko. “He’s hot, he’s tall and ripped, broad shouldered, and he looks great, but he’s not quite the adult Avatar that he needs to be yet. So this film is really trying to dive into that.”

Figuring out who these characters were a decade later wasn’t the most daunting task.

As Montgomery puts it, “The series had done such a great job of establishing who these characters are. We weren’t going to pull any crazy, ‘Then now they’re different.’”

The bigger challenge was fitting everything into an 85-minute film.

“We couldn’t perfectly service every character to the maximum,” she says. “We really had to make sure that we serviced the story about Aang.”

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Much of that narrative revolves are Aang’s unresolved trauma. Growing up among the Air Nomads, Aang fled as a child when he realized he was the Avatar. Frozen in ice for a century, he awoke to find all the airbenders were wiped out by the Fire Nation’s campaign for world domination. No one, Konietzko says, could ever finish processing that.

Katara (Jessica Matten) in ‘Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender’Credit: Paramount+

“This pacifist trickster, good-natured monk, we saw him rage out and make some mistakes in the original series,” the animator reflects. “But here, he has so much unresolved survivor’s guilt and trauma from this genocide that wiped out his people that it does actually push him in a direction that isn’t quite good, or it makes him make some hasty choices that maybe aren’t the best for his partner and his friends and himself and the world.”

These feelings come to the forefront when Aang discovers a frozen Airbender at the top of a mountain, just as Katara and Sokka discovered him encased in ice all those years ago. Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) voices said bender, Tagah, who may have a means of reconstituting their people. As the trailer teases, he’s not entirely benevolent.

“He’s designed to be a bit mysterious,” DiMartino describes. “It is this story about not just a friendship or a brotherhood [with] these two guys who are now the sole survivors of this culture and trying to bring it back, but realizing you’re from a totally different time... The film’s a lot about unpacking their different points of views and philosophies on what it means to be an Airbender.”

“We had more time, we had more money, we had more resources”

Aang meets a new Avatar in ‘Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender’Credit: Paramount+

It’s not just the characters that have a new look. The film itself takes on a new animation style, one more closely aligned to the anime influences of the original series.

“The guys really set up the anime inspiration with Avatar: The Last Airbender, leveled it up for Korra, and this really was just the next level up,” Montgomery says. “We had more time, we had more money, we had more resources. It’s what we could do if we had this budget for everything, but we don’t. So you do the best you can.”

The team credits production designer Jake Panian (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), as well as returning character designer Ki Hyun Ryu. They partnered with South Korean animation house Studio Mir, which worked on Korra, and Australia’s Flying Bark Productions.

“Early on before I was involved, there were wants or desires for CG, because the thought is every movie is CG,” the director says. “But I know Mike and Brian pushed back pretty hard on that because Avatar’s soul has always lived and breathed in this very beautiful hand-drawn art form.”

“No one ever said we had to do 3-D. It was just this assumption,” Konietzko clarifies. “Even us in the Avatar world, we just assumed now [that] we’re doing a feature, we have to do CG characters.” He points to projects like Netflix’s Arcane series and Sony’s Spider-Verse movies that utilized the style well, but they inevitably came back to the origin of Avatar as “a love letter to Japanese anime.”

“That’s our legacy,” Konietzko continues. “Mike agreed and no one pushed back, amazingly. Now, actually executing that was very challenging. No movie’s easy. Any kind of animation’s a nightmare. But finding enough people — studios that have a staff and a pipeline, stability to take on something as big as this — is a huge challenge. But we all wanted to do what we could to help keep this art form not only alive but thriving a bit longer.”

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, as even the trailer suggests, was designed for the big screen, from the action to the score to the spectacle. The film was meant to have a theatrical release, though with the Hollywood merger of Skydance and Paramount, the new leadership shifted the film to streaming platform Paramount+.

Aang enters the Avatar State in ‘Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender’Credit: Paramount+

Many fans, to this day, have strong feelings about the move.

“We all have feelings about it,” Konietzko acknowledges. “Hollywood is changing rapidly. Even on Korra, we got caught up in it.”

The team on The Legend of Korra dealt with multiple time-slot shifts on Nickelodeon’s linear TV slate before the final seasons were released on the network’s website.

“Then here again, we found ourselves originally on one path under one set of leadership and then that path changed,” he adds. “I think it’s just part of a broader thing that all studios and a lot of our friends and colleagues are also dealing with on other projects.”

Paramount+, he says, is still supporting the film as the streaming platform hopes to be the go-to destination for all things Avatar, including the upcoming Avatar: Seven Havens, the next sequel TV series to follow The Last Airbender and Korra.

“I think if we had just been kicked to the curb and felt like no one cared about us anymore, it would be harder to deal with,” Konietzko says, “but they are really excited not only for this but for Seven Havens — and for the other projects that we’re working on.”

Those attending Comic-Con International in San Diego at the end of the month will have a special opportunity to see Avatar Aang in a theater setting. In addition to a July 23 panel in Hall H, a fan screening will take place on July 24 in Ballroom 20. (DiMartino jokes, “We finally made it to Hall H for our panel. We just had to have a film stolen to get in there.”)

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“It’s always fun to watch something surrounded by a first-time audience and especially if that first-time audience is fans who, ultimately, are excited for the thing you’re making,” Montgomery comments. “So I will for sure be there.”

The sting of these recent developments clearly lingers, but for the first time since the leak, the filmmakers, much like their characters, reclaimed their hope and optimism. Should enough people watch The Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender on Paramount+, DiMartino and Konietzko have multiple other ideas for Avatar Studios.

“The Aang movie was just one of a whole slate,” Konietzko says. “I’m working on another thing, which we’ll announce when the time’s right.”

If there is a net positive to the leak, it’s that those who watched it liked what they saw. That’s a testament to the artistry that went into this. (The team confirms a making-of art book is already finished and on the way. “It would be a crime not to,” Montgomery says.)

“When I saw Princess Mononoke at the Laemmle theater in L.A., it was like a religious experience for me. I came out and I said, ‘That’s what I wanna do with the rest of my life,’” Konietzko reflects. “And that led to Mike and me creating Avatar together. Now 20-plus years later, to get to make a film with a director as incredible as Lauren and a team as incredible as the one that we all assembled, it’s a dream coming true. No matter how this came out or what fate came to it through criminal actions, at the end of the day, there is no other film like this in the American animation industry.”

on Entertainment Weekly

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