Every Avatar: The Last Airbender Show And Movie, Ranked

© Paramount+ / Courtesy Everett Collection Published Jul 27, 2026, 4:15 PM EDT Sean is a senior writer for ScreenRant and has been writing about new TV releases since December 2023. He has received multiple advance screenings of popular shows and ideated his own coverage read by hundreds of thousands of readers. Sean is a self-published author of a Western novel. Sean has also written award-winning opinion pieces related to local politics while getting his Bachelor's degree in journalism. Sign in to your ScreenRant account It's been 21 years since the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise began and the acclaimed animated series has grown into a sprawling franchise with two movies and three shows, but not all of them were created equal. In the years since the original Avatar: The Last Airbender came to be regarded as one of the greatest cartoons of all time, the franchise has only continued to grow. This year alone, there was a live-action adaptation, a new animated movie, a fighting video game, and another upcoming The Last Airbender show, Avatar: Seven Havens. As The Last Airbender continues to grow, and before Avatar: Seven Havens changes the franchise once again when it premieres on October 9, it's worth looking back to evaluate everything the franchise has produced so far. The series has had its fair share of misses over the years, but it's also had some major wins. It has also retread the original series several times, but it's also found new ground and been able to tell a new, interesting story at times. 5 The Last Airbender (2010) Easily the worst installment in the entire franchise is M. Night Shyamalan's 2010 live-action film The Last Airbender. This is the franchise's only project that can really be considered objectively bad, but it earns that distinction. The Last Airbender debuted to awful review scores, earning a paltry 5% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and a slight loss at the box office. It's even gone down in infamy as one of the worst live-action adaptations of all time. The main issue with The Last Airbender is, surprisingly, not the changes it made to its source material, as it's a fairly faithful retelling of Book 1: Water. The issue is that it's just not a good movie. The acting performances are stilted and uninspired. The visuals have brief moments of being good, but they fall flat almost constantly. The pacing is somehow incredibly slow, despite condensing 10 hours of plot into 100 minutes. Its greatest sin, however, is that The Last Airbender is just boring, in stark contrast to the fun, bright, and remarkably deep show it's based on. 4 Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender The other live-action adaptation of the original show, Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender, proved significantly better than M. Night Shyamalan's earlier attempt, but it still wasn't great. Netflix's The Last Airbender has a lot going for it. Some of the highlights include great action scenes with really impressive visual effects, good practical costuming, and a commitment to maintaining the fun and humor of the original series. Even some of the live-action show's changes and additions, such as focusing more on Fire Lord Ozai from the start, have proven to be worthwhile. Unfortunately, Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender has as many negatives as positives. Some of its changes, particularly to Aang and Sokka's characterization, have made the show feel shallow and overly sanitized. It also suffers from some inconsistent acting; characters like Zuko and Azula are spot-on, while Katara and Sokka leave a lot to be desired. Most of all, Netflix's live-action The Last Airbender can't seem to decide if it wants to be humorous and fun like the original or more intense and serious, and it often pivots between the two without committing to either. On the whole, Netflix's The Last Airbender is fairly good. It's not groundbreaking stuff, even as adaptations go, but it was never going to surpass the original. It has some glaring issues, but it also has more than enough working in its favor to make it a worthwhile watch for fans of the original animated series. At its best, it adds new context and texture to The Last Airbender and offers fans a chance to see a great story in a new medium. 3 Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender © Paramount+ / Courtesy Everett Collection The newest entry in the franchise, the animated film Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, is also the franchise's best film by a wide margin. Avatar Aang is a direct sequel to the original series following the Gaang as adults as they find an ancient airbender named Tagah. As Screen Rant's review for Avatar Aang pointed out, it's a winning blend of nostalgia for the original series combined with enough new elements to make it worthwhile. Avatar Aang gets a lot right. It updated the main cast of Aang, Katara, Toph, Zuko, and Sokka, both by casting more representative voice actors and by portraying them as young adults, in a way that kept the core of their characters intact. Its new animation style adds a lot to the film's visual interest and gives the movie some of the franchise's best fight scenes. The actual story of Avatar Aang is also quite good, and it engages with the genocide of the Air Nomads and Aang's lingering guilt in a very meaningful way. Avatar Aang isn't, however, without fault. The film's villains, a group of non-benders dubbed The Denied, are poorly defined and entirely forgettable. It also brings the Gaang back together ostensibly for nostalgia purposes only. Toph, Zuko, and Sokka are basically inconsequential, and Avatar Aang doesn't do anything worthwhile with them beyond a few fight scenes and some offhand comments about their respective nations. On the whole, Avatar Aang was good, but it could have been a lot better. 2 The Legend of Korra The most underrated Avatar entry by a wide margin is The Legend of Korra, an untraditional sequel series. The Legend of Korra follows the next Avatar in the Avatar Cycle, a waterbender named Korra. Though viewers initially didn't like Korra's personality, especially as it compared to Aang, the show gets a lot of points for daring to take risks with such a beloved franchise. Korra was never afraid of being its own, new thing, and it made some really great additions to the franchise. Korra herself is a great protagonist who was perfectly suited to her show's interest in throwing new kinds of challenges at the Avatar. Throughout the series, Korra has to wrestle with the political and spiritual side of being the Avatar much more than Aang ever did, and her brash and stubborn personality makes that quite a challenge. Seeing Korra grow and develop as her own person, stepping out of Aang's shadow, also gave The Legend of Korra a great progression. The Legend of Korra's side characters are where it really shines, however. It had colorful personalities like Varrick and Bolin, who provided great comedic relief. It had some of the best villains in the entire franchise by a very wide margin. Kuvira, Amon, Unilaaq, and Zaheer are wildly entertaining, they were perfect antagonists to Korra, and they fueled some of the most nuanced and mature storytelling in the entire franchise. The Legend of Korra did have some problems, but they're relatively small and much easier to overlook than other entries in the franchise. Season 2, for example, was bogged down by exposition about the Spirit World and the history of the Avatar. It's also just not as fun as the original, as it sacrificed the sense of wonder about the world of Avatar in favor of telling a more mature story. Still, The Legend of Korra is a great show and the most worthy successor the original series has ever gotten, even after 12 years. 1 Avatar: The Last Airbender Despite several attempts, nothing has been able to fully recapture the magic of the original animated Avatar: The Last Airbender. This show truly captured lightning in a bottle. There's no other way to put it. Everything about The Last Airbender works. It has a rich and beautifully nuanced fantasy world to explore, it has one of the most inventive and visually interesting magic systems ever dreamed up, and it has an unparalleled cast of complex characters. Avatar: The Last Airbender may just be the greatest animated children's show ever made. It's undoubtedly for kids, but it never feels childish. It treats its audience with respect and confronts them with complicated and dark ideas. The Last Airbender handles topics like genocide, war, the burden of responsibility, and redemption with more nuance and grace than some adult shows do. Even at its heaviest, though, The Last Airbender never feels boring for even a second. There's almost too much to talk about with The Last Airbender. The animation style, the voice acting, Zuko's near-perfect redemption arc, Toph and Azula just as a whole, the humor, Katara's unique blend of kindness and stubbornness, Aang grappling with his responsibility and wanting to be a child, all of it is just so good. The only real drawbacks of the show are Fire Lord Ozai being underdeveloped and a few filler episodes, as well as some outdated elements like Sokka's sexism and the show's non-representative cast. Perhaps the worst thing about Avatar: The Last Airbender is that it may have set the bar too high. It created such a lovely and interesting world, but all the explorations of that world that have followed since the original ended in 2008 have left viewers wanting. Only time will tell if the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise can ever surpass the show that started it all. TV Show(s) Avatar: The Last Airbender, Legend of Korra (TV Series), Avatar: The Last Airbender Video Game(s) Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Burning Earth, Avatar: The Last Airbender – Into the Inferno, Avatar: Generations, Avatar: The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance, Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Path of Zuko, Avatar: The Last Airbender – Bobble Battles First Film The Last Airbender First TV Show Avatar: The Last Airbender Cast Zach Tyler Eisen, Mae Whitman, Jack De Sena, Dante Basco, Jessie Flower, Grey DeLisle, Mark Hamill, Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, Ian Ousley, Dallas Liu Created by Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko