WHAT WENT WRONG - The Last Airbender

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

M. Night Shyamalan’s whitewashed adaptation of the beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender remains his most expensive and critically derided film. How did such acclaimed source material yield this unmitigated flop? Join Chris & Lizzie as unabashed Avatar fan-boy (and What Went Wrong producer) David Boman attempts to piece together an answer.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emily Rossum was also in it. Emmy. Emmy Rossum. What? Emmy Rossum. Her name's not Emily. All right. David just views all women as ladies.

Sorry. True. Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong. I am your host, Chris Winterbauer, here with my co-host, Lizzie Bassett. How are you doing this week, Lizzie? Oh, Chris. Great. Better than last week, you know.

I do have a bone to pick with the person who's going to be joining us shortly for forcing me to stop. my 17-hour below-deck marathon to watch this movie. I'm not happy about that. Well, let's get right to it. This week, we're very excited to bring on a guest host, our producer, David Bowman, who has elected to make us watch a movie that I have spent 10 years avoiding. David, welcome to the show. Tell us about the movie that we're talking about today. Thank you. So today we're going to be talking about M. Knight-Sharmulan's 2010 most critically paned film, his adaptation of Nickelodeon's Avatar, The Last Airbender, the film entitled The Last Airbender. The name was changed because...

Avatar. Correct. Avatar, the James Cameron film, had just come out in 2009, and they didn't want to confuse people. Plus, I think James Cameron owned the rights. So I'm really excited to talk about this as a fan of the show. But the reality is this film was a huge missed opportunity. This should have been awesome. But due to issues of whitewashing, arbitrary name changes, and an emphasis on aesthetics over

story. M. Night Shyamalan's the last Airbender franchise crashed and burned before it ever really got started. So, Chris and Lizzie, I'd love to get your reactions. And I would love to know where it stands on the most important metric we have here at What Went Wrong, which is, was it better than Fantastic Four? Ah. So I watched this movie today. I've never seen the cartoon before. I am a big M. Night Sharmelan fan. This was my least favorite movie that we've watched on this podcast. I thought it was worse than fantastic for. I had no idea what was happening throughout the story, even though it seemed like it was just exposition. It was like somebody explaining something to me in a different language. So I struggled with it, but I remain a fan of M. Knight Shaman and an offender of even some of his

films that other people don't like. Lizzie, what about you? Well, first of all, very brave to come out as a big fan of M. Knight Shama'amon. Big fan. Big fan. No, listen, I actually, I love several of M. Knight's movies as well. I have seen the cartoon before. I must disclose that the reason I've seen it is because David made me watch it. So, Lizzie, then maybe you should be the one that describes the plot of this movie. Oh, God, no. I had no idea what was happening. I felt like every scene, like someone would exit. And then someone else in the scene would be like, he's gone off to the water kingdom, I think, where he's going to meet with X and Y and Z. And here's what you need to know about them. And my grandmother told me once and I was just like, oh my God. I think generally speaking, there are four

kingdoms, fire, water, air, and earth. There is one prophesized airbender who can control all four elements and he has disappeared for the last 100 years, which has led to imbalance in the kingdoms. And the fire people have been waging war across the other three kingdoms are two lead characters who are river rat, white Eskimos at the beginning, find the last airbender who's been frozen for a hundred years and he doesn't realize how long he's been gone. It's basically turns into the matrix. He's going to be the one that unites everybody in the end through his multidisciplinary airbending skills. And then there's a whole lot of intrafamilial intrigue and Dev Patel, father, son issues, and it gets very confusing. All right. So,

So what went wrong is a little harder to say. It's not like Don Quixote, which we did last week, where there were these disasters and various things that slowed things down. There's very little information on what went wrong during production. There's very little information I could find about production. My takeaway from that was kind of that it went pretty well. It went kind of according to M. Knight in the studio's plan. In my view, what went wrong with The Last Airbender had to do with Mnight's possibly misguided ambitions as a filmmaker at that time? and a sort of lack of insight about how to capture the essence of the source material.

There was too much focus on the most surface level, features of the characters and the visuals of the world, and not a lot of attention paid to the themes and the sort of spiritual elements and the things that made the show so loved. And, Dave, to be clear, this movie's like 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, I think. Ooh, right? Correct. That's the worst rated one, isn't it? Yeah, that is our worst rated one so far. The quick primer for this is that it's based on successful.

anime show, which ran three seasons. The last airbender of the movie was planned by Nickelodeon Paramount, Blinding Edge, which is M. Knight, Shawmalan's production company and the Kennedy Marshall Company to be a trilogy, one film for each season. This season would have corresponded with water where the Avatar Master's Water. The studio intended to spend $250 million on the trilogy. On the whole trilogy. Oh, that's not very much. It's not. They ended up spending $150 million on this one before marketing. Let's just talk real quickly about M-night, and I don't want to get into too much of opinions because people tend to be very opinionated. I have my sort of take on him and... David loves signs. False. Let's get this out of the way. M. Night Shyamalan made the six

cents, which was a fantastic movie. Yeah, that's incredible. When he was 29 years old. Yeah. After earning pretty much universal acclaim and being very celebrated for that in 99 at 29 years old, as Chris said, he got a lot of questionable reviews in the following years. At the time that the last Airbender is going to be made. He is fresh off of Lady in the Water. Oof. And The Happening. Also real bad. He is in sort of a vulnerable place with the critics and whatnot. Lady in the Water received 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Happening received 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. Just to be clear, Lady in the Water lost a lot of money also. Okay, so let me read the description of the show because there are diehard fans of it, and I want to start off by giving a concise description of what it's all

about. Avatar is set in an Asiatic-like world in which some people can manipulate the classical elements with psychokinetic variants of the Chinese martial arts known as bending. One individual, the avatar, is capable of bending all four elements and is responsible for maintaining harmony between the world's four nations. It is presented in a style that combines anime with American cartoons and relies on the imagery of East Asian, South Asian, Inuit, and New World Societies. To be clear, the show is American and it was made in America. I didn't know that. Okay. I'm a huge fan of the show.

People think that it's a bit weird to be a fan of the show because it's kind of a children's show. But it's celebrated for exploring themes rarely touched on in children's programming, including issues relating to war, genocide, imperialism, totalitarianism, gender discrimination, and female empowerment, coping with disability, as well as philosophical questions surrounding fate, destiny, and free will. It really was pretty deep. All themes, by the way, that I didn't feel in the movie. Right. And to be fair, I mean, I mean, and this is not an uncommon thing with adaptations, but he was trying to fit a 20-episode season into one film, which is why it's often kind of ill-advised to try and adapt something like this the way that they did.

But to wrap up on what I was talking about with the show and how much people loved it, it won a primetime Emmy, five Annie Awards, which recognizes excellence in animation, one Genesis Award, which, do you have you guys heard of that? No. The Genesis Award is awarded by the Humane Society to Entertainment Programs that raise awareness of animal issues. won Kids Choice Award for Favorite Cartoon and a Peabody Award. So we're talking about a very celebrated to many people, a sort of sacred source material. Let's hear the creators of the show, Michael Dante de Martino, and Brian Kinitzko interviewing Shamalan about how this movie came to be.

So Knight, how did you first learn about Avatar, the last Airbender? Actually, from my daughter, who's seven, and she was obsessed with this show, but I really didn't pay attention to what she was obsessed about. I'm like, oh, this is this show after. I'm like, okay, honey, we're going to go out and it's on again. It's on again. And I was like, okay, okay, I'll put it on for you.

And then for Halloween, she wanted to be Katara. And I'm like, you know, that's what she wanted to be. And I was like, what is this Katara thing? And so she told me all about it. We had to like look it up and all the stuff. Still it hadn't hit. And then one day we were in the video store. And she said, can we, oh, the first season's on DVD.

Can I get it? And I was like, okay, she really loves this. Let's watch. So we all had dinner and the four of us watched it. The whole family sat down and watched it. We just got watching the next episode, the next episode. And we came up in the kitchen and I opened the fridge up and I said, this would make a great movie.

And then everybody was like, yeah. So that's how it started. To be clear, whether or not these guys are excited about Shama on adapting it, this is an arranged marriage. In all of these instances, the studio owns the rights to the property that these two men created. and they are ultimately the ones that decide to hire M. Knight Sharmulant. So that M. Knight Shamblan might have been their top choice, that he might not have been. It's irrelevant.

The studio makes those decisions. And at the end of the day, they have to figure out a way to work together, you know, to make this project happen. Right. I want to play the next clip where he's addressing why he wanted to make it into a movie. So, Nate, what attracted you to want to make the Avatar live action movie? The martial arts was a big thing for me. I really was looking for something to do where I could do. these cool fighting scenes and everything

and Avatar had such a beautiful way of doing that and the supernatural with all the elements that's another huge thing for me and then it's kind of based on all this Eastern stuff with kind of the reincarnation of the avatar it's a really beautiful beautiful ideas behind it so you know there's a lot of reasons why I wanted to make this movie

it actually doesn't seem like he has a stronger grasp on the themes of the material the themes yeah the story is what the kids like and the fully grown men who also watch the show like David enjoy. That was my exact reaction, too. What strikes me when he's talking about it is he's talking about the martial arts. He's talking about the aesthetics.

But he doesn't talk about connecting to the story or the characters, the relationships. And that is the essence of the show. Of course. So let's get to casting. For the three leads, that is Aang, Katara, and Saka. They cast, for Aang, Noah Ringer. Now, Noah Ringer is a martial arts expert. He is a badass.

I saw this like behind the scenes footage of him a day on set. And he's incredibly graceful. Sorry, and that's the last, he's the bald kid, the airbender. Yes, he is the avatar. I don't remember anyone's name. How old is this kid? I want to say he's like 14. Oh, buddy.

He seems like a super nice kid. And he looks like the character, but he is not an actor and he has never acted. He was discovered because Paramount put out an open casting call that M-night was like, oh, this isn't going to go anywhere. but he saw the tape of Noa Ringer, and he was like, all right, this kid's good at martial arts. Yeah, his movements were beautiful. I will say that for watching him at least. He was the only one that when I was watching him, I felt like I was watching something close to the movement of the show.

Totally. So he had to do one month of acting school before shooting, one rigorous month of acting school. Amnai is quoted saying, rather than faking the martial arts with a kid actor, I decided to teach a kid how to to act who was a martial arts expert. That's not a bad idea. I do have to say, like, I think that is probably the right approach. I think based on the result, that's definitely the wrong approach. I'm with Chris on this one.

Yeah, like, use a stunt double. There's short men. Or use him as a stunt double. Yeah, use him as a stunt double and then shave some other boy's head. All right, all right. You got a good point. I was trying to give no other benefit of the doubt here. Also, there are established very good actors in this movie who have trouble.

with the material because it's so outlandish. So to put it on the shoulders of an 11-year-old boy who's never acted before, to me, that's a huge mistake. I think he looks the part, and I think he seems like such a cool kid, but I think it's a shame that this is sort of how he became public to people. Yeah, talk about a trial by fire. So we have Nicola Peltz, starring as Katara, who's the sister, or as Chris would refer to her as the female River Rat.

Shamaelan loved her for Katara. In a People magazine interview, he said, he would not want to make the film without her. Quote, I said that only once in my career, and that was when I met Haley and the Sixth Sense auditions. Yeah. And then the third lead is going to be Jackson Rathbone, and he had a reasonably established career at this point

because he was playing Jasper in the Twilight saga. Obviously, which I would like to point out as another incredible adaptation, that of books. And if you have not watched Jackson Rathbone's performance, in the Twilight films. I mean, you don't need to. It is funny. Jesus is sorry.

Well, he's pretty bad in this, too, but we're not blaming the actors here. What do these three leads have in common that you might view as a little unexpected, given the source material? They're all white. Right. In the show, Ings race, and that is the Avatar, he is most closely portrayed as a Hindu priest or a Buddhist monk. It is clear in the show that Katara and Saka come from an Inuit influence culture. Yeah.

March 1st, 2009, it becomes clear based on a New York casting call that they intend to make the Fire Nation characters, the bad guys, Indian and Southeast Asian. Oh, I didn't even pick up on that, but you're totally right. I was like, you cast all of your brown people as the bad race in this movie. Oh, man. Exactly. We've got dark-skinned people as the enemies in light-skinned people as the heroes, when that is not in any way reflective of the source material.

Indeed, Dev Patel was cast as Prince Zucco. A little aside on him, he had submitted a video audition before Slumdog was even released, so he was totally fresh off of that. On December 9, 2008, Entertainment Weekly leaks the core cast. Two days later, people begin making social media groups and writing letters and opposition of the choices. Whitewashing in these anime adaptations is not a completely new thing. You may recall, probably won't recall, but you may recall 2009's Dragon Ball Evolution.

Yeah, Justin Chathwin. Justin Chatwin played, I think it was, I can't even remember. You played the Dragon Ball. Okay. You played the lead in that. And Emily Rossum was also in it. Emmy. Emmy Rossum.

What? Emmy Rossum. Who are women's names? All right. David just views all women as lady. Sorry. True. There's another one that's not anime, but is comic book based that we should throw in here as well,

which is Tilda Swinton in Dr. Strange, which is continuing, actually. right interestingly enough all this to say anime movies and as Lizzie mentioned comics are sort of plagued by this trend as are a lot of things in Hollywood Roger Ebert when asked about this said the original series avatar the last air vendor was highly regarded and popular for three seasons on Nickelodeon its fans take it for granted that its heroes are Asian why would Paramount in Chamalan go out of their way to offend these fans there are many young Asian actors capable of playing these parts yeah shaman's response ultimately this movie in that and the three movies will be the most culturally diverse tent pull movies ever released, period.

Paramount put out a statement saying the movie has 23 credited speaking roles, more than half of which feature Asian and pan-Asian actors of Korean, Japanese, and Indian descent. The filmmaker's interpretation reflects the myriad qualities that have made this series of global phenomenon. We believe fans of the original and new audiences alike will respond positively once they see it. So it boils down to a debate where people are saying, These characters were clearly Asian in the cartoon. Why are you changing that versus Chamalana? And producers saying basically, what are you complaining about?

We have this incredibly diverse cast. Sure. By some metric, you have a very diverse cast. That's the thing. The response that they just came back with was like, we hit our quota. What are you complaining about versus people saying these characters on the show are very clearly Asian and Inuit. And they are the heroes. Why have you changed the heroes to white people?

which is a valid question, regardless of how diverse the rest of the cast is. I would just go further and say, independent of the ethics, it's jarring to see these two young white kids in full Inuit costumes at the beginning of the story. Were they adopted into this culture? And it was even actually more confusing when they went back to their village. And I saw a bunch of little kids following Jackson Rathbone and it looked like they had cast all. Inuit actors to play these children following him. Right.

I felt like it was also creatively a weird decision. Totally. We'll come back to this stuff a little bit when we get to how the film was received. Production, as I said, they're going to be shooting in Greenland and reading Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. M. Knight-Shammalon bases a lot of his production in Philadelphia because he's from Pennsylvania. Let's take a little departure from all this stuff for a moment and just talk about the VFX, which I thought the VFX were pretty cool. I liked his fan. Yeah, the VFX were fine.

there was never a point where I was like, oh, this is hokey or something like that. I thought they were totally fine. I thought the water stuff was really cool. Yeah, totally. It looked good. The VFX were done by ILM. That's industrial light and magic. For those of you don't know, which is George Lucas's company.

We talked about them previously on The Abyss. They have done a lot of sort of water monster things in the past. What they said, and what I'm wondering if Chris can talk about a little bit, they said that they didn't have the desired technology needed to create the effects at the time they were trying to make them. It says, rather than software, computer graphic cards. It's worth a basis of, quote, for bending elements, allowing previews to be viewed more swiftly. This resulted in Shamalan having to direct more than 60 takes before the effect was finished and lined up with his visions.

It sounds like, based on what you've read, M. Knight-Shammelon wanted to be able to see a version of the effect live on set through the monitor while he was directing or something that could be rendered very quickly. So he could determine whether or not the movements of the characters matched up to what the effect was producing. so you bring these heavy-duty hardware graphics cards onto set and you're live rendering these animations so that he can direct and then view the result immediately as opposed to directing on a green screen and then getting a result weeks later. But the issue with that is that it gets to be very expensive, obviously,

because you're paying for your VFX team to be present on set, which is more people present on set, then you're paying for that technology to be used on set, then you're spending time waiting for things to render on set, and then you're directing more takes to get it right, as opposed to saying, I think we, you know what I mean, more or less have it, let's move on. So I could see that being a very desirable decision for a director

to be able to see it, but also a very expensive one. Right. It seems like he's really focused on nailing these visual effects. And, you know, it was interesting to read about how for these animals that are kind of like hybrid animals that don't really exist. They were studying the way that these creatures moved and just really trying to nail sort of the kinetics of them. And I thought that stuff was perfectly convincing. Did I think that it was convincing enough to distract me from how bored I was?

No. No. Here we are a few months before the film's release, which is set for the end of June in 2010. And in late April, Paramount announces that the last day, Airbender will be released in 3D. This decision came after an increasing number of films being made or converted to 3D such as Avatar Alice in Wonderland and Clash the Titans made a decent profit at the box office. Also, Piranha 3D. I saw Piranha 3D live in theaters. I did too.

That's the only one of those I actually kind of want to see. I did a quick Google search of 3D films released in 2009, 2010, and discovered that 69 films were released in 3D in those two years. Oh, my God. So this, I mean, we all remember this, right? Like when everything was just 3D and it made us all nauseated. Yes. Avatar was the only one that I liked in 3D. Exactly.

Everyone here has their take on 3D movies, but one person above all feels very strongly and that is our friend James Cameron. James Cameron was quoted saying, you can slap a 3D label on it and call it 3D, but there's no possible way that it can be done up to a standard that anybody would consider high enough. I think what he's saying is that you converting it in post. I think he's saying he's better than everyone. Well, sure. That's what he's always.

But the idea being that you can't just convert it in the last month or two before its release, which is what they were doing. Which is true. 100% true. You have to shoot it for 3D if you want to actually have that be good. So despite this, Sean Malon decided to work with Stereo D LLC, which also worked on Avatar, and the conversion process costs between 5 and 10 million on top of the reported 100 million that had already been spent on the last air vendor. Let's get to the release of the film. It is released on June 30th, 2010. having been made on a $150 million budget, it is M-night's most expensive film, and that is to date,

even now. It's opening weekend. It debuted at number two behind Twilight Eclipse. It made $40 million. Which is not good for a $150 million movie. Like, you, ideally it would be clearing $90 million on the first weekend easily, especially a holiday weekend. And also, to be clear, that's Twilight Eclipse's second weekend. So it's losing to a movie that had already been in the box office for a full week.

And here's my guess about what they were thinking there, too, is that Twilight Eclipse, that's obviously like they're targeting a female audience for that. I bet they're thinking that it's going to be fine to air this the weekend after because this is going to get all the guys. So the fact that it did not do that, that's not a great sign. The film has premiered at this point. Let's talk about how it's received by fans. Fans despised this film for many reasons. But there was one singular issue that really, really didn't sit well with fans.

The movie could have been as bad as it is right now, and if they had just called him Ang, once! The characters really screwed up each other's names. You don't take the main character and change his name. His name is Ang. I'll be happy they'll at least said Ang once. Just to confirm what you surely already suspected, the most emphatic voice you hear there, It does belong to a 17-year-old man with his head shaved and a blue arrow painted on it. Wait, did they change his name or did they just never say his name?

So if you're confused about what you just heard, basically the character's names were completely butcher. The main character, the avatar is named Ang in the show. In three scenes in the show, it's always Aang. However, in the film, Shamalan decided to pronounce it on. Why would you do that? Not only did he mispronounce that. The character played by Jackson Rathbone, whose name in the cartoon is Sond.

was pronounced Soka, Uncle Iro was pronounced Eero, Agni Kai became Agni Kyi, and even the word avatar became avatar. Like, Ang to Ong almost sounds like he's trying to hit the phonetics of an Asian language. In a wired interview, M-night said, for me, the whole point of making the adaptation was to ground it deeper in reality. So I pronounced the names as Asians would. Oh, my God. It's just impossible to pronounce Aang.

the way it is used in the series. It's incorrect. I can't do that. So I just pronounced it correctly. And yet you cast them as white people. That brings us back to the whitewashing. As you guys said, this is a obvious contradiction. If he's going to assign them with the net and the names that are respectful of the cultures from which he thinks they derive, then why is he casting them as white? Several organizations called for a boycott of the movie on the basis of the casting choices, such as racebending.com and the Media Action Network for Asian American. That tells me that M. Knight-Shamalan's approach to this entire franchise was, you don't know what's good about this franchise. I'm going to make it better, which is like the worst possible way I think you can approach material that fans really love. There's a lack of respect there for the source material. And I'm saying, I agree with you, Lizzie. I think he made a bad decision. But I ultimately think when you hire someone, you're hiring them because it's their vision. It has to be.

I agree with you to a certain extent. To me, it comes down to, is the filmmaker in service of themselves, or are they in service of the story? I just don't think you can separate those things. I think you can. And I think he was very much in service of himself on this. Let's get into how M. Knight responded to this stuff, because it speaks to what you guys are talking about in a certain way.

Voltaire caught up with M. Knight after the premiere, but before he had seen the reviews, I don't know what to say about that stuff. I bring as much integrity to the table as humanly possible. It must be a language thing in terms of a particular accent, a storytelling accent. I can only see it this certain way and I don't know how to look in to think in another language. I think these are exactly the visions that are in my head. So I don't know how to adjust it without being me. It would be like asking a painter to change to a completely different style.

I don't know. I mean, that's fair. Of course, in terms of the fan reaction, this was just the tip of the iceberg, obviously, hearing the name mispron announced throughout the entire movie was just horrible and grating and incredibly irritating, but they were disappointed for all the reasons we've discussed, the lack of nuance and the lack of character development, the amount of exposition, as you guys have talked about, these battle scenes that basically meant nothing. The critical responses were not much better. Richard Corliss of Time magazine. You can relax, bloggers. The dearth of racially appropriate

casting in the U.S. simply means that fewer Asians were humiliated by appearing in what is surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic since Ralph Bokshi's animated desecration of the Lord of the Rings back in 1978. The actors who didn't get to be in The Last Airbender are like the passengers who arrived too late to catch the final flight of the Hindenburg. Roger Ebert, the last Airbender, is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right, not here. It put nails in the coffin of low rent 3D, but we will need a lot more coffins than that. Let's hear what Shammuan had to say in response to these reviews. The reviews in America have been pretty

harsh, but does that affect the way you move on to number two? Well, no, you know, the critics are, I don't know what's going on with me in the critics in the critics of the United States. I got to tell you, something's going on. They just don't get you. They've never got me, and it's getting worse. They're like, it's almost like, go away. And I think, I also think that I'm getting more, you know, influenced by other cultures more, as you can see from the movie. And so I'm not doing like a straight up American movie anymore. The tonalities are changing. You know, I always had a European sensibility to my movie. So they, the pacing is always a little bit off for them, you know, and it feels a little stilted and they need more, they need more electricity and all that

stuff. And I'm like, this is the way I think of things. because, you know, Hitchcock and Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick, these are like my teachers. And so it could be a little bit of that that there's just a little bit of cultural difference because, like, you know, just like on this movie, like I'm very used to kind of getting on a plane from the U.S. having been savage by them and then going to,

like in this case, I went to Japan next. And then they're like, genius. I often tell people that I'm big in Japan, but it's not necessarily true. Also, what he just said there is not true. He was absolutely lauded by critics for critics for the sixth sense. Unbreakable as well was very critically acclaimed. Science was very well reviewed, did very well.

I would argue, sir, that your movies that were bad were ripped to shreds by critics. Now, I will say that one thing that I kind of, you know, it's easy to poke fun at him. But one thing he's not saying is this movie. movie sucked and it's not my fault. Yeah, he's standing behind it. Ultimately, the buck stops with him and he's going to defend it and that's him doing his job. And so good on him and good on him for going to the interviews even after. Yeah, doing the press. That's very true. You got 6%, 5% on Rotten tomatoes. Well, this movie was very much panned and not well received by most. There was a small subgroup of people who loved the movie and just had a blast seeing it. The blind? That's what I

I was the British. Let me put it this way. A website called Cinema Blend put out an article entitled, The British are laughing at the last airbender for a whole new reason. In British slang, Bender means homosexual. The last airbender by the director, Amnite Sharmulon, about young warriors with the mystical power to bend, the elements there will, provoked no end of childish mirth in Britain. Oh no. That's also the wrong reason to be a fan of this movie, I think. I will say what's unfortunate, I just noticed, saw this article today. Stories like this have often been viewed as coming out allegories. Really Wichowski just spoke about how the Matrix was a trans allegory. If handled in a more interesting way, that could be the case in this instance,

figuring out that you're different embracing that and who you are. And then to instead have it land in the opposite domain of like, let's give anyone that thinks that's still funny something to chuckle about with their friends. I do believe that the cartoon does have a following for that reason and has landed with the LGBTQ audience as having themes of discovering yourself and being true to yourself and coming out. Totally. That makes me sad. That's what they were laughing at. So at this point, the film has been very poorly received. The prospects for a trilogy have basically collapsed. So as we approached the end here, let's move down the line a few years and see, you know,

where people stood after this had all sort of settled. And hear from the creators of the show in 2014 sort of reflecting on it, they had basically not commented at all. And this was kind of the only actual audio interview that I could find where they do reflect on it. We were trying to be like holding onto a shred. of hope and half like like who knows like you never know you know like maybe this could end up being halfway okay like yeah and they're asking for our input so we'll try to help that was our stance from the get go sure a we didn't want it to be done at all before anyone was attached we didn't want

and then b if it was going to be done we wanted to do it but they weren't going to let us see when they attached night we just thought well this is what we've been dealt let's we'll just be offer help when it's asked of us and if it's not we'll stay out of the way and in the beginning it was more positive and we offered help but then and then we had a big falling out and whatever so when you say did we have any involved we gave like input that went nowhere so it's like we were involved but our involvement had no effect right so we could say we had no involvement, but then, you know, someone might be like, well, I heard you did this. At the end of the day, it's not the first time it had ever happened that a project was

horribly adapted in Hollywood. It's not the last time it's going to happen. It might even happen to us again. You know, we never know. But like, I'll definitely approach it differently the second time. Check us out. In July of 2019, in a Volta interview, M-night was asked to comment on it. Vulture asked, you said there was a moment in your career following the last Airbender and after Earth where you'd hit a wall and nobody would make a movie with you. His response was what I was getting was a lot of, hey, do you want to do? And I'd say, well, I want to do this. And they'd say, hmm, how about this instead? Then I'm like, yeah, maybe you're right. When that happens, I'm lost. I'd stopped doing the things that allowed me to feel at peace. I was the one who allowed that to happen.

I didn't make the right decisions and you're complicit in all that when you take that much money to make a movie. I'm guessing that the amount of money that they offered him was a life-changing amount of money. And it might be that coming off of the happening and Lady in the Water, already, folks weren't that interested in the next original M. Knight-Sharmelon story. I think that's a really good point. And then he does, if you notice, he does two in a row. He does Airbender and then After Earth. And then I do know for a fact that he began partially self-financing his movies. And he might have even completely self-financed the visit when he decided, I need to get back to what I do, which is tell my original stories for better or worse. Well, and I think that actually comes back to what we were arguing about a little bit earlier, which is that what M. Knight-Sharmelon is good at is telling a story that is completely his own.

what it would appear he is not good at is being able to take a story and a property that exists somewhere else and sort of add himself to it in a way that enhances it versus just completely takes it over and destroys it. So the last airbender cost 150 million to make and an additional 130 million was put into marketing. It made 132 million in the U.S. and 320 million worldwide, a net loss of 40 million. To date, it is his most expensive and lowest rated film at, as we said, 5% on Rotten Tomatoes. It earned five Razies at the 31st annual Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture, worst supporting actor for, I believe, Jackson Rathbone, worst director, worse screenplay,

and worst eye-gouging misuse of 3D. The final sort of thing to say about this is Netflix released news in 2018 that they will be doing an adaptation of The Last Airbender. Live action? Yes. Oh. And on this one, the creators Michael Dante de Martino and Brian Kinnitsko will be involved. So what went right?

For me, I thought that it proves once again that ILM is the VFX house to work with. I thought that the work that they did on the movie was exceptional. This is a bit of a backhanded compliment, but I believe this was the first bump that got M. Knight Shaman back to his forte, which is telling elevated horror stories that he has complete control over. And I am a huge, huge M. Knight Sharmelan fan. I love the Sixth Sense. I love signs. I think Unbreakable is very good. I then skip a bunch of his movies. I really like the visit, devil, split, servant. I think he's unique and exceptionally talented. And I I'm thrilled that he's back doing the types of movies that he got to start doing.

So that's my backhanded what went right is that it got him back. Because I could imagine this being perhaps more mediocre, doing better at the box office, and he's then made three of them, or he's the new James Cameron, and he's making nine last darebenders from now until 2060 in some deal with the devil. So that's my what went right. For my what went right, I mean, first of all, I guess what went right is this didn't destroy Dev Patel's career because I love Dev Patel and I'm glad he's okay. But I'm going to also say I liked seeing Asaf Manvi in a more serious role who, if anybody doesn't know, he was a daily show correspondent for a long time with John Stewart. He's very funny. He has been in a lot of movies as sort of like the very funny sidekick. But it was nice to see him do something different and something more serious. He's sort of an evil commander in this and he was pretty fun. I would love to see him do more dramatic. stuff. And I actually think he's a good actor and I like him a lot. So I was glad to see him

highlighted in this. So my what went right, I am a film composer. So I would be remiss not to mention that James Newton Howard, who scored this and has scored a lot of, I think most of M. Knight-Sharmelon's films, everything he writes is beautiful. He's incredible. I thought that the score, for an epic sweeping score, it was great. It was certainly didn't match the show's sort of corkier vibe, but he, you know, he does what he does so well. I thought that Noah Ringers, skill as a martial artist, came through as we talked about. And I thought that was awesome. And as you guys mentioned, I thought the VFX worked really well. And if I can leave you with one thing for this, it is do not take the failure of the movie as guidance to ignore the show. The show is amazing.

You should watch it with your kids. You should watch it with your nieces and nephews, because it really is, full of very meaningful lessons and good themes, and it's a great show. And if you don't have kids or nieces of your nephews and you just live alone, you can watch it by yourself. It's true. It genuinely is fantastic. And you'll feel like you're closer to someone, you're a sad, lonely person. Thank you guys so much for listening.

I just want to give a quick tease of what's to come because I'm pretty excited about it. This was a listener suggestion, and next week we are going to be covering the one and all only Wizard of Oz. So get ready for a lot of mistreatment on set and some people that shouldn't have been burned that got burned. And that's all I'll say about it. We will take you down that yellow brick nightmare road next week. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonioos.