Paramount is shoving Avatar Aang into just enough theaters to qualify for awards

Great news for Avatar fans in New York and Los Angeles; much crappier news for everybody else.

By William Hughes | July 15, 2026 | 9:35pm

Image: Paramount

Film News Avatar: The Last Airbender

Upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender sequel movie Avatar Aang has not had an easy road to release, to put it mildly. To start with, the film was initially set for theaters, before being moved by its overlords at Paramount over to a streaming release just as it was being finished—with director Lauren Montgomery not quite able to clamp down on her pretty obvious unhappiness that a film that she and her team had spent years shoving full of cinematic element-flinging action was getting punted onto the world’s teensiest screens. Then scenes from the unreleased film began cropping up online—followed by reports that the entire movie had been leaked. Sure, it was hypothetically nice that fans were applauding the footage—and, in some cases, trying to leverage their appreciation into a push to get the movie moved back into theaters by the powers that be. But the people who worked on the film were not quiet about how much it sucked to have their work get spilled out all over the internet in such a disrespectful fashion, calling on fans not to watch the leaked material, and instead wait for the movie’s actual premiere.

Now, though, there’s a very mild silver lining to all this chaos, as the film—which picks up 13 years after the original Nickelodeon finale of the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender series—and its July 25 release date approaches: Turns out, Avatar Aang is going to run in theaters! Two theaters, specifically, in New York and California. And for exactly as long as it’ll take to qualify the movie for official consideration for major awards.

That’s right, Paramount is Netflix-ing this sucker, giving the film (per Variety) a run in a single movie theater in Manhattan and one in Los Angeles, where it’ll run for three showings a day from July 24 to July 30. (I.e., the exact minimum requirements laid out by the Oscars.) Sure, this little technicality will be fun for those audiences who’ll actually be able to get out to those showings, and means the studio is anticipating an Oscars push, which will presumably be nice for all involved. But it’s not much consolation to the vast majority of Avatar fans, who we have to assume were really hoping to have a theatrical memory to replace any previous experiences they might have of seeing M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender at the multiplex back in 2010.

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