On Avatar Being the Next Star Wars or Marvel

 On Avatar Being the Next Star Wars or Marvel


Maybe Star Trek is a better comparison. It's the twentieth anniversary of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The not-quite-new Avatar Studios under Nickelodeon has announced their next series, Avatar: Seven Havens. Avatar Studios was established in 2021 to make more Avatar shows. A few years ago they announced there would be some movies too. As for any of these pieces of media to actually materialize, it feels like they've been frozen in an iceberg. Over the past twenty years, there have been books, comics, games, and an ongoing Netflix adaptation of the original show. There were even Lego sets around the original run of Avatar. What's missing are more actual movies and shows. Basically, Avatar is getting the franchise treatment, but for some reason really slowly, almost hesitantly.

The original Avatar show is perhaps the greatest animated show of all time. It's the greatest I've ever seen, but I admit that's a limited sample size. The question I have is why it's taken so long to get to only its third show. Twenty years and counting.

There's plenty of precedent for a television show-based franchise with spinoff movies. Star Trek is primarily a TV show-based franchise with plenty of movies, some good some we don't talk about. Speaking of movies we don't talk about, the same goes for Avatar. Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe are both what I would call movie-based franchises with spinoff TV shows. The major difference between Avatar and the other major franchises that holds Avatar back isn't that it's animated, there are now two live-action adaptations, it's that it's fantasy.

Most of the major franchises are science fiction. The fact that most of the major franchises are all genre, that is sci-fi, fantasy, or horror, isn't because the nerds won. It's because those franchises can be used to tell an ever-increasing number of stories. The major exceptions are spy franchises, like James Bond and Mission Impossible, which are their own kind of fantasy, and they almost always mix in sci-fi tech. The Fast and the Furious movies at this point have jumped to sci-fi, but they sure need a lot of magic for their cars to keep driving the way they do. There was even a Fast and Furious animated kids show on Netflix, so it counts as not just a series but a franchise.

The other major fantasy franchises are ones like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, both of which have series ongoing or in the works. These are very different types of fictional worlds, and both are very different than Avatar. Compare that to the differences between Star Wars and Star Trek. The major sci-fi franchises are similar enough that they at least have a similar feel. You could tell a Star Trek story set in the Star Wars universe or vice versa, just set it on a different type of spaceship and with different alien species. Star Wars is particularly versatile with its latest TV show, Skeleton Crew, being The Goonies in space. You couldn't as easily tell those stories in Middle Earth or at Hogwarts. Well, maybe The Goonies specifically could be Hobbits or go to Hogwarts, but the rest of Star Wars would have a harder time of it. The more types of stories that can be told in a setting, the more room the franchise has to grow. Star Wars and Marvel are at the top because of their flexibility. The Guardians of the Galaxy was a standard sci-fi setting that looked like it could be either Star Wars or Star Trek (maybe closer to Star Trek: Lower Decks as far as humor goes) but it was the Marvel franchise telling the story, the same world as Iron Man and Captain America.

So where does this leave Avatar? As a fantasy franchise, it's only got medium flexibility for the types of stories it can tell. As its core medium is animation, some potential older fans may be turned off by it. But it's got advantages as a fantasy series, and that's by being different. The Lord of the Rings works because it's the grandfather of modern high fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons is trying to be its own version of The Lord of the Rings. Nintendo has a Legend of Zelda movie in the works, and that franchise too draws influences from Tolkien, though there has been talk of TV shows and movies based on that IP for decades. Avatar is a unique enough world that it won't be interchangeable with other fantasy worlds, and it's proven hard to copy as well. Disney tried to make a version of Avatar with its film Raya and the Last Dragon. Neither the storytelling nor worldbuilding was strong enough to carry it forward to franchise-hood as Disney dreams about with all their films.

Avatar is good enough to carry a franchise. The worldbuilding is a solid foundation, and the stories have been deep and meaningful. Fans have waited twenty years with only a single other show, The Legend of Korra, between the original and whatever comes next. It has everything it needs to sell the merchandise that is the real lifeblood of a franchise. Everything, except the next installment to tune in and watch.

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