On April 12, the anonymous X account ImStillDissin shared a pair of minute-long snippets from what appeared to be the unreleased film Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender. He had said Nickelodeon “accidentally” emailed him the entire movie, which turned out not to be the case. More on that later. “I saw it’s just a Paramount+ thing, so I decided I’d troll a little bit” by posting the videos, he told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. A day later, a full-length version surfaced online.
From there, the situation metastasized into a crisis for Paramount. Its lawyers combed the internet to scrub clips and downloads of the film, though by then it was too late. The two initial X clips that sparked the saga racked up more than 100,000 likes in 12 hours before being taken down. Superfans hosted watch parties of the film, which appeared on Letterboxd’s “popular this week” list. To this day, counterfeit DVDs are still being hawked on eBay.
For Avatar: The Last Airbender fans, the movie was supposed to be a long-awaited return to the franchise. The original show, which ran from 2005 to 2008, had a dazzling Netflix run in 2020, when it topped the streamer’s daily chart for more than 60 days, and even last year, when it ranked as the third-most-streamed animated show on the platform. In some corners, it is regarded as Nickelodeon’s magnum opus and is among the most-beloved American animated shows. Twenty years later, Paramount sees value to be mined.
