Live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender boss avoided watching M. Night Shyamalan movie

If one should bring up the notion of a live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender, for better or worse, it conjures images of the M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Before Netflix set out to adapt the beloved Nickelodeon animated series into a serialized fantasy epic, the director of Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense made 2010's The Last Airbender, marking the first attempt at a Hollywood-made live-action version. And it did not go over well.

"I'll tell you something, I never watched the Shyamalan movie," Albert Kim, the showrunner behind Netflix's live-action Avatar series, tells EW in an interview. "There was a period of time where I thought I should watch it, but then I thought, I don't really want those images in my head as I start to go forward with our version of this project. So I avoided it purposefully."

"Now," he adds, "that's not to say I hadn't heard the criticisms of it." Those criticisms ranged from the casting of white actors in Asian or Indigenous roles, such as Nicola Peltz as waterbender Katara and Jackson Rathbone as her brother Sokka; to the quality of the visual effects and the acting performances. Not to mention the critics did not hold back in sharing their grievances.

"I knew what fans didn't like about it in general," Kim continues, "but those kinds of pitfalls weren't hard to avoid. For instance, an authentic version of the casting, that's something that we would've done regardless. And, to be fair, Shymalan's movie was made at a time when the technology hadn't caught up yet to what the world deserved. So I knew that the VFX was going to be much better than whatever they did anyway."

The Netflix series begins to adapt the events of the animated series, which takes place in a medieval-inspired world of benders, those with the power to manipulate one of the four elements: water, earth, fire, and air. Gordon Cormier stars as Aang, a reincarnated being known as the Avatar who can master all the elements to maintain balance in the world. Having been missing for years, this young teen — the last of the Air Nomads — emerges at a time when the Fire Nation is deep into its war for domination. He must team up with his new friends, Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley), in order to save the world.

Eight hour-long episodes will drop on Netflix when the streamer unveils the first season this Feb. 22. Kim is still deep into postproduction on the series, honing all the VFX work to be ready for that date. So he still hasn't watched the Shyamalan movie. But will he ever?

"I do remember when we were well into production, [executive producer/director] Michael Goi had said, 'You should just watch the Shyamalan version for fun now,'" Kim recalls. "I'm like, 'No, I've gone this far. I'm just going to skip it. I don't want to.' He kept trying to tease me into watching. I think I'm going to carry through with my track record of not having seen it."

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