'Avatar: The Last Airbender 2' director M. Night Shyamalan continued to defend his first film from long-standing criticism. He is also reported ready to push through with a sequel.
It has been 5 years since the release of the first film in the series and criticism seems to want to continue following Shyamalan around whenever talks of a sequel come up. According to Movie Pilot, the filmmaker was not to blame for the Nickelodeon cartoon adaptation's failure with critics and audiences alike.
It is undeniable that Shyamalan is a master writer-director in his own right with successful supernatural films under his belt including 'Lady in the Water', 'The Village', 'Signs', 'Unbreakable' and 1999's cult favorite 'The Sixth Sense'.
The report tagged the 45-year old Indian-American an original visionary but may have done a serious error in judgement after accepting to do a 3D and live-action adaptation of the children's television favorite, which was seriously attacked by fans and critics worldwide.
Shyamalan defended his film from the seemingly endless bouts of disapproval in an article by IGN. He explained his motives behind his own interpretation of the series that clearly was below the expectation of regular audiences.
He said, "It's really weird because on the show the average age was, like, nine-years-old... My child was nine-years-old. So you could make it one of two ways. You could make it for that same audience, which is what I did -- for nine and 10-year-olds -- or you could do the Transformers version and have Megan Fox. I didn't do that... Those kids, it's for them. It was for them, to talk about mysticism and Eastern philosophies through a 10-year-old's vernacular."
He added that creating a kid's show into a mature, adult-oriented film would be like "a betrayal of the innocence of the piece".
On the other hand, a separate interview by IGN with the original animated show's creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante Dimartino revealed that the two decided to pretend Shyamalan's big-screen adaptation didn't exist at all. It also rated a 6% on film review website Rotten Tomatoes and 4.3/10 on imdb.com - rather low and embarrassing assessments for a Shyamalan movie.
According to Den of Geek, Shyamalan planned to push through with a sequel as evidenced by the introduction of Prince Zuko's sister, Azula, at the end of the first film. It was going to be a trilogy. However, despite previous news that he had already penned a first draft for the follow-up, no updates have come up since then. It is also uncertain if development for this would push through some time in the future.
'Avatar: The Last Airbender 2' will be the sequel to 2010's big-screen adaptation of the Emmy-Award winning children's television series. It aired on Nickelodeon for three seasons and was popular with critics and fans of all ages. The first film starred Noah Ringer as main protagonist Aang, Dev Patel as Prince Zuko, Nicola Peltz as Katara, and Jackson Rathbone as Sokka. It received generally negative reviews and was considered one of the worst films for that year.
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