A grown-up Aang and revenge on the pirates: how the creators of Avatar survived the worst leak of the year and still blew up Comic-Con

Four months before the premiere, someone leaked the entire film online — a rarity even by the standards of Hollywood, where leaks have long become background noise. The creators of the franchise could cancel the presentation or remain silent. Instead, they took the stage at San Diego Comic-Con and showed what the grown-up world of Avatar had turned out to be—and at the same time announced a sequel that fans had been waiting fourteen years for an answer to.

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Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the creators of the original animated series, presented their first full-length project under the Avatar Studios brand at Comic-Con on Thursday: the animated film “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Judging by their words to Reuters, the idea to start the return of the franchise with a full-length film, and not with the next series, belonged rather to the studio — since they decided to remind themselves, then on a grand scale, and not with half measures.

The production was directed by Lauren Montgomery, writes xrust. The main attraction for fans who have waited almost two decades for the story to develop is that the characters are shown as adults. DiMartino described this as a natural step: if the series ended with Aang growing up as a person, then the next chapter simply had to find him already a formed person, who nevertheless continues to deal with the trauma from childhood — the same one that determined his fate as the last Airbender.

The background for the premiere came out crumpled. In April, the full version of the film — without watermarks and editing cuts — became freely available on X and specialized forums after an anonymous person with the nickname ImStillDissin posted fragments, claiming that the material was “accidentally” sent to him from Nickelodeon. The version of an accident was not confirmed: according to several industry sources, a suspect was later detained in Singapore, and an investigation pointed to a hacking of a third-party service that had access to the film, which cost the studio tens of millions of dollars.

Konietzko admitted that he learned about the incident on Sunday morning — and called the incident unceremonious and truly cruel to the team that spent years on production. Voice actor Jessica Matten (Katara), who represents Indigenous people in North America, said that as an Indigenous actress voicing a character from the same community, the role was iconic for her: she said it directly reflected on her community and helped build connections with broader audiences and industry decision-makers.

Who returned to the frame

Eric Nam (Aang), Jessica Matten (Katara), Roman Zaragoza (Sokka), Steven Yeun (Zuko) and Dionne Quan (Toph Beifong) are voicing the grown-up team. A new character received special attention — air master Tagah, voiced by Dave Bautista; the very fact of his appearance hints that Aang, contrary to the title of the source series, will not be the only surviving airbender.

The project went through a series of postponements: the premiere was initially planned for October 2025 — on the twentieth anniversary of the original series — then moved to January and October 2026. After the leak, Paramount unexpectedly accelerated the process: the wide theatrical release was canceled in favor of an exclusive on Paramount+, and the premiere date was completely moved to an earlier date — July 25. For a narrow, high-quality release in Los Angeles and New York, the film will still be shown on big screens — from July 24 to 30, but solely for the right to qualify for an Oscar.

Seven Havens: the next chapter fourteen years after Korra

At the same time, at the same panel, Paramount+ showed the first teaser for the series “Avatar: Seven Havens,” a direct continuation of the story after the events of “The Legend of Korra.” The premiere date is October 9, symbolically coinciding with the originally announced date for the film about Aang, which was eventually abandoned.

The plot takes place in a post-disaster world: a young airbender named Pavi discovers that she has become the new Avatar after Korra — but in this version of reality, such a title makes her not the savior of humanity, but its destroyer in the eyes of the survivors. Together with her long-lost twin brother, she must discover the origin of her powers and save the surviving enclaves before the last strongholds of civilization fall.

The cast includes Saheli Khan, Aishu Dewan, Akshaye Khanna, Major Kurda, Sakina Jaffrey, Darren Barnett, Diane Doan and Dee Bradley Baker. Paramount+ initially said that all 26 episodes would be released in one package — similar to Netflix's strategy for its live-action version of Avatar — but later clarified that the season would be divided into two «books» of 13 episodes, as was customary in the original series.

Why does Paramount take such a risk

There is a logic in the fact that the company did not postpone the presentation after the failure with the leak, but, on the contrary, accelerated the premiere and doubled the ante with the announcement of the series. The franchise has already shown that the audience is ready to forgive the studio almost everything except silence. Netflix's live-action adaptation of Avatar, which debuted in 2024, also had its fair share of turbulence, with the departure of original showrunner Albert Kim and the handing over of the director's reins to Jabbar Raisani and Christine Boylan, but the series still retained audiences through branding rather than a smooth production process.

History repeats itself with amusing regularity: DiMartino and Konietzko already tried to adapt the original for Netflix in 2018-2020, but left the project, citing creative differences. Returning to the material through their own studio, where they have complete control, looks less like a nostalgic gesture, and more like an attempt to complete what could not be done with someone else’s hands.

What does the Russian viewer have to do with it

Paramount+ is not available in Russia, like most major Western streaming services, so there will be no official legal way to watch either the film or the future series — unless the situation changes by the time of the premiere. For a generation that grew up watching Nickelodeon dubbing the original series in the early 2010s, this is nothing new: the franchise here has traditionally been viewed through fan group translations or through purchasing episodes on foreign platforms.

At the same time, the story itself — about matured heroes forced to reassemble themselves after trauma, and about the fact that power and destiny are not always a gift — resonates regardless of the geography of the show. Judging by the reaction on social networks after Comic-Con, part of the audience is already ironic that the creators chose a post-apocalypse instead of the cyberpunk setting that has long been proposed by fans; part — discusses casting and the fact that nothing is still known about the fate of the third full-length film in the trilogy.

Sources:

1. Reuters, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter

Xrust Grown-up Aang and revenge on the pirates: how the creators of Avatar survived the worst leak of the year and still blew up Comic-Con