Ever since the news of the live-action adaption of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been announced fans have been jumping with excitement. The animated series was brilliantly executed with its characters and the well-designed fight sequences with a clever plot making this a faithful series. Naturally, fans will have grand ambitions from the TV Series adaptation as well.
The Netflix reboot has big expectations from the series as the show has kept the original essence of the show intact. Moreover, it also showcases much better CGI and SFX as compared to its previous adaptation, The Last Airbender. Nevertheless, Avatar: The Last Airbender still faces a massive problem despite having a budget of $15 million for each episode of the series. Albert Kim addresses the issue and feels hesitant to talk about the future of the show.
Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Low Budget Makes Fans Unhappy
Avatar: The Last Airbender has made a massive comeback in recent years as fans have rediscovered the program following the show’s announcement of the new live adaptation into a TV Series. With a reported budget of $120 million, and each episode costing almost $15 million to produce. Season 1 of the show will feature 8 episodes in the show.
Albert Kim, the showrunner of Avatar: The Last Airbender addressed the critical issue of not being able to include everything from the anime series that will make the fans unhappy. During an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kim shared his thoughts on a limited budget which might lead to leaving some things behind, and he’s sure that some fans would be unhappy for not getting “their favorite episodes and their favorite characters.”
“Well, there’s certain things you can draw that when you’re trying to translate in live-action are incredibly complicated, both practically and financially. There are so many epic sequences in the original series that I wish we could have done, but it would have just broken the bank many times over. The Northern Air Temple episode of the first season is a finale in itself, and if we had tried to do that we would be blowing all the resources right there.”
“So, we had to pick and the toughest part of this process was deciding what to leave behind — and I’m sure there will be fans who are not happy that they didn’t get their favorite episodes and their favorite characters, and all I can say is it pains me too.”
The showrunner was heartbroken and felt that this was one of the toughest parts of creating a live-action adaptation TV series with a limited budget and skipping some episodes would somewhat affect the show’s future.
Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Showrunner Addresses on Skipping Some Episodes From The Anime
In the same interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Albert Kim addresses the fans telling them how he wished that he “could have done all of them,” but limited episodes and the world expansion, integrated with telling new sides of the story would consume the time and episodes. Though it was not an easy process, this is what they went through while producing the show.
“I wish we could have done all of them, but there’s the reality of creating eight-hour-long episodes for a serialized drama and also expanding the world in places and telling new parts of the story that hadn’t been told before. That takes up time.”
“I think people think it’s as easy as saying, “Well there are 20 half-hour episodes of the original. That’s 10 hours. And there are eight one-hour episodes of the new show, so they only needed to make two more episodes.” But it’s not exactly one-to-one there, so that was the process we went through.”
Nevertheless, the show has already got the attention of the fans, and only time will tell if the show will get a renewal or not.
Avatar: The Last Airbender can be streamed on Netflix.
