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WHAT WENT WRONG

ENCORE: The Last Airbender

WHAT WENT WRONG

Sad Boom Media

Flop, Film, Film History, Blockbuster, Acting, Disaster, History, Tv & Film, Movie, Directing, Hollywood

4.84.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 OUR PATREON FOR 'WWW' BONUS CONTENT!

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello boys and girls and welcome back to another pulled from the vault episode of what went wrong. It's one of our favorites, the wonderfully watchable.

0:09.0

That's a stretch. Avatar, the last airbender, which we are re-airing for you in celebration of M Night Shyamalan's new movie, Knock at the Cabin, which comes out this Friday, February 3rd, and stars my personal favorite wrestler turned actor, Dave Bautista.

0:27.0

Lizzie, is there anything else you'd like to share with our friends?

0:30.0

Nope, that's it. Enjoy this episode co-hosted by our lovely producer and composer and editor David Bowman, and keep an eye out for season 4 of what went wrong, coming to your ear holes on February 20th. That's right.

0:43.0

We're changing our release day to a Monday. Don't fight me about it. Enjoy.

0:48.0

Emily Rossum was also in it. Emily Rossum. What? Emily Rossum, right? There's a lot of women's names. All right. David just views all women as ladies.

0:58.0

Sorry.

1:11.0

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?

1:19.0

Oh, Chris, great. Better than last week. 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.

1:32.0

Not happy about that.

1:34.0

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.

1:46.0

David, welcome to the show. Tell us about the movie that we're talking about today.

1:50.0

Thank you. So today we're going to be talking about M Night Shyamalan's 2010 most critically-panned film, his adaptation of Nickelodeon's Avatar, The Last Airbender, the film entitled The Last Airbender.

2:02.0

The name was changed because...

2:04.0

Avatar.

2:05.0

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.

2:14.0

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.

2:20.0

This should have been awesome, but due to issues of whitewashing, arbitrary name changes, in an emphasis on aesthetics, over story, M Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender franchise, crashed and burned before it ever really got started.

2:33.0

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,

2:43.0

which is, was it better than Fantastic Four?

2:46.0

So I watched this movie today. I've never seen the cartoon before. I am a big M Night Shyamalan fan.

2:52.0

This was my least favorite movie that we've watched on this podcast. I thought it was worse than Fantastic Four.

...

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