The first of the new Avatar: The Last Airbender animated movies will focus on the original gang — but in their adulthood. The Paramount Panel at Cinema Con revealed that Aang, Katara, Sokka, Zuko, and Toph all appear to be in their late 20s and early 30s. When the movie comes out on Oct. 10, 2025, the characters will be same age as many of the people who grew up watching them. Man, time passes!
This new animated movie is the first of three movies attached to Nickolodeon’s new Avatar Studios banner. Lauren Montgomery, who worked on the original show and also Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender, is set to direct this first installment.
We’ve known about the upcoming Avatar movies since last year, when Paramount announced that the original creators would be working on new movies. This is not to be confused with the upcoming live-action Netflix adaptation. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the creators of the original series, departed the Netflix version, citing creative differences. But both DiMartino and Konietzko return to produce the new animated movies, expanding the universe in the same way it was first created.
The original animated Avatar series aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008. Set in a fantasy world where certain individuals can harness the four elements with specialized martial-arts moves, the show follows the titular Avatar, the only person capable of mastering all four elemental styles. The Avatar is reborn once every generation and is meant to maintain balance between the four elements and their wielders, but as the series begins, the Avatar has been missing from the world for a century. Reincarnated as a plucky 12-year-old named Aang, the Avatar and his friends must face the tyrannical Fire Nation, which is waging a devastating war against the rest of the world.
The original Avatar: The Last Airbender and the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, are currently streaming on Netflix.
