“Avatar: The Last Airbender” gets 2-season renewal to conclude live-action adaptation

The live-action reimagining will continue through season 3.

The Avatar's journey is in no danger of ending early.

After topping the Netflix streaming charts, the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender received a massive double renewal that lets the show continue on through season 2 and 3. While the episode count for each season has not been disclosed, Netflix confirms showrunner Albert Kim and his team have enough runway to adapt the entirety of the Nickelodeon animated series, which ran for three seasons.

Avatar: The Last Airbender premiered on Netflix Feb. 22, and even though there were loads of mixed reactions within the fandom at large, everyone seemed to watch it. The show became the streamer's No. 1 English-language TV project with 41.1 million views in 11 days, according to Netflix.

Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Fire Lord Ozai, trolled the cast of the series for the announcement. Appearing over video chat with stars Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, Ian Ousley, Dallas Liu, Elizabeth Yu, and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, the actor made it seem like they had been canceled before revealing the good news.

Watch their reactions in the video below.

Season 1 tackled the events of Book One: Water, i.e. the first season of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender. The series is set in a feudal world of benders who can manipulate one of the four natural elements.

Cormier stars as Ang, the next Avatar, a reincarnated being and the sole individual who can master water, earth, fire, and air to maintain balance in the world. But when Ang, a young airbender from the Southern Air Temple, flees from his responsibilities, he gets trapped by a storm and frozen inside ice for 100 years. His absence allows the Fire Nation to wipe out the Air Nomads and wage a war for global domination.

Kiawentiio also stars as Katara, a young waterbender from the Southern Water Tribe who joins the newly reawakened Ang on his quest to restore peace to the world; Ousley stars as Sokka, Katara's brother; and Liu stars as Zuko, the banished Fire Nation prince who's determined to hunt down the Avatar to restore his honor.

We already know there will be a time jump in between seasons 1 and 2. Kim explained in a previous interview with EW that he needed to make tweaks to the story in order to account for his young actors visibly aging up on screen. Cormier, who auditioned for Ang at the age of 11, is now 14. Kiawentiio, who joined the show at 14, is now 17. And so on.

“All three seasons of the animated series essentially take place in the course of one calendar year,” Kim said. “There was no way we could do that. So we had to design this first season, especially, to accommodate the possibility of some time elapsing between the first and the second season.”

One way he did that was to postpone Sozin's Comet. In the original Avatar, the comet passed over Earth every 100 years, allowing firebenders to draw on its energy and enhance their own powers. “The comet was their ticking clock,” Kim explained. “We removed that particular ticking clock from our show for now because we couldn't know exactly how old our actors would be for the subsequent seasons."

As the season 1 finale's mid-credits scene on the live-action series reveals, Sozin's Comet will now factor into season 2. The sequence shows Fire Lord Ozai poring over a celestial model of the comet's trajectory.

"We definitely thought about that going into season 1 so that we can accommodate for puberty, adolescence, time passing — all of those fun things that happen to real-life human beings that don't happen to animated characters," Kim said.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is now streaming on Netflix.

This article was updated with the cast announcement video.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Related content:

• A new Avatar awakens: Inside The Last Airbender’s live-action reincarnation

• How Avatar: The Last Airbender brought back the OG Cabbage Merchant: 'The biggest celebrity we had on set'

• Daniel Dae Kim sees Fire Lord Ozai as the Darth Vader of Avatar
  

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.