4 min readOne of the biggest Hollywood leaks since North Korean hackers released all those Sony emails in 2014 happened last weekend. Avatar: Aang, the Last Airbender was an upcoming sequel film to the hit Nickelodeon fantasy series Avatar: The Last Airbender that aired from 2005 to 2008 and set a new standard for all-ages animation. Originally scheduled for wide release on October 9, the movie was instead made into a Paramount+ exclusive that would premiere on the streamer instead of the big screen. I describe the movie in the past tense because now its release is in doubt. The whole movie is online.
On April 12, X user @ImStillDissin posted that Nickelodeon “accidentally emailed” them “the entire Avatar aang movie” with a now-deleted clip from the film as proof. (While the user expresses some familiarity with the franchise, they’re not even a fan account, which makes the movie landing in their in-box a thing of pure chance.) The next day, the whole movie surfaced on 4chan and has since been uploaded in full by random accounts on X/Twitter.
How the movie was leaked in the first place is still an enigma. While there has been some mention of hackers, those claims are unsubstantiated. Neither Paramount nor Avatar Studios, the entity founded in 2021 to act as creative shepherd to the franchise, has officially acknowledged the leak. It appeared out of thin air is honestly the most accurate explanation for now.
Regardless of its source, this is a nightmare scenario for any movie, let alone a legacy sequel to a generational TV show. (Which is not to be confused with James Cameron’s films also titled Avatar.) Even if you don’t know a thing about Avatar, or care, a leak of this sort should worry everyone about the near future of the entertainment field. While the streaming era has blurred which movies gets the in-theater experience and which are reduced to background noise for doomscrolling, it’s upsetting that a movie originally green-lit for theaters is now rolling out in a way it wasn’t made to be. And now it’s out there. Even if Paramount moves forward with its October 9 plans or, hell, gives it the theatrical release fans still want, the movie is tainted with dulled colors. This summer was to be the runway for its autumn release with trailers, Comic-Con panels, and prerelease interviews setting the tone, in particular for fans who’ve waited years to see these characters again. What good would a trailer be now when you could, in theory, watch all of it right now in full? As many already have?
Besides the craven shortchanging that occurs when you deprive creators a cut of box-office revenue, it’s denying an opportunity to make an event out of this; not every movie can have a Cinderella turnaround like Kpop Demon Hunters. The impending Trump-friendly Paramount-Skydance will soon see Warner Bros. absorbed in a merger that will further damage the entertainment industry by shrinking it and shirking the labor of thousands of artists. That a sequel to a franchise like Avatar went from theaters to streaming without explanation is basically a threat for what can, and will still, happen to other movies. Chillingly, the leak has compelled fans to continue pirating because they refuse to subscribe to Paramount+ over the studio’s decisions.
It is further devastating for the artists who worked on the film, whose work is now out without the fanfare of a true release. Julia Schoel, a Los Angeles animator who worked on Avatar, expressed their disappointment on X. “I don’t like seeing people use paramount’s awful decision to remove the movie from theaters to justify leaking it,” Schoel posted on X. “[P]irating the movie after its release would have at least been better than this. This is incredibly disrespectful to all of the hard work the artists put in.”
Tessa Bright, whose X profile identifies them as the Animation Director at Flying Bark Studio, also expressed heartbreak. “I understand that we all have opinions about what happened and what you decide to do is your personal choice. But it breaks my heart to see the way some fans are treating the hard-working artists who dedicated years of their lives to bring you the best possible work they can with this film,” Bright wrote.
“It’s perfectly reasonable for anyone who worked on this project to be frustrated at this situation. The amount of effort and dedication it took to make this film happen speaks for itself in the final product and I’m sure a lot of you will agree.”
In 2014, the Marvel film Deadpool saw a huge “leak” in which test footage—which had Ryan Reynolds in both voice-over and motion capture—was uploaded online. At the time, the movie was in danger of being canned by 20th Century Fox, which hesitated over the film’s R-rated tone (a death knell for the genre at the time). The online virality of the footage encouraged Fox to green-light the movie. Two years later, Deadpool opened in February 2016. It grossed $782 million worldwide and launched a new franchise for Fox (later Disney, after the 2018 merger).
This Avatar situation isn’t really like Deadpool’s, as the latter’s filmmakers have since joked that someone on the movie (Reynolds) intentionally leaked the footage. It was also a concept reel, not the full movie. But there is hope from Avatar fans that their enthusiasm will make Paramount change course and bring the film to theaters. It’s precariously slim, as eager fans have now seen the movie several times over. Until then, there is still one Avatar that remains a true box-office giant.