While showing off an early concept photo of the aged-up Team Avatar at a San Diego Comic-Con panel on Thursday afternoon, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender director Lauren Montgomery recalled one of the films’ earliest leaks in a rollout that’s been plagued by unfortunate leaks. The image in question was what Montgomery called the “Avengers shot,” with the characters posing together that leaked out of CinemaCon in 2024 before it was taken down.
“This was one of the very first funny stories about this image. We had a version of this image, exact same painting. The characters looked a little bit different,” Montgomery said. “Our production designer Jake [Panian] was never really happy with it. And then Paramount comes to us and says, ‘We want to go to CinemaCon.’ Jake is, like, ‘Absolutely not. It’s gonna leak. They’re like, ‘No, no, no, no. It won’t leak. Everything’s safe.’ Everything leaks. [Jake]’s like, ‘Well, if they’re gonna leak it, I’m gonna repaint the whole thing.’ And he did. And it looks beautiful, and it looks amazing, and we’ve used this image a lot of times. And of course, it leaked. Cell phone camera footage of it from a weird angle. And then it’s used as, like, official artwork in freakin’ interviews and posts everywhere. So, good time.”
Moving on from the anecdote, Montgomery walked through a slideshow of early character design concept art. She showed an Aang with a chinstrap-style beard, many iterations of Zuko’s hairstyle, multiple versions of Sokka (“The note was alsays don’t let ‘Sokka get TOO hot,'” Montgomery said), Toph in a “metalbending police get-up,” and a pregnant Katara. “We moved away from that for our own reasons but a lot of those versions influenced the final version of Katara we see in the film,” Montgomery said.
In mapping out how the team would then animate these rendered images for the feature film, Avatar co-creator Bryan Konietzko reflected on maintaining the importance of Avatar’s defining animation style in the same panel that was attended by his fellow Avatar creator Mike DiMartino and most of the core voice cast of the movie. “One of the first things that we talked about was what the medium was going to be. No one told us, but we just assumed: It’s a feature film. There’s incredible stuff, like Spider-Verse, Arcane… people are doing really stylized, beautiful things with 3D characters that are kind of pushed more towards 3D. So we just assumed initially, ‘Oh, I guess that’s what we’ll do.’ And we started trying to figure out what that would look like.
“But then one day it just hit me,” Konietzko continued. “I was like, ‘What are we doing? This is Avatar. This is a love letter to Japanese anime. This needs to stay 2D. These characters need to be hand drawn.’
Our friends and peers in the industry — in the Western industry, especially — they want to do 2D, but they’re being forced to do 3D. And again, there’s beautiful stuff being done in 3D, but as artists, we should be able to explore all these different mediums. Mike and I were just like, ‘You know what? We’re gonna do 2D,’ and luckily, our bosses were not forcing us to do 3D. So that’s what we did. We’re trying to keep this art form alive a little bit longer.”
Creating a New Language System
Konietzko also walked through the process of creating a new written language for the universe moving forward, called Avatarian.
A look at the written language!#SDCC2026 #ATLA #AvatarAang pic.twitter.com/AtkpZyt8h8
— Cartoon Universe (@CartoonUV) July 23, 2026
“When we came back to do Avatar studios, we were working with our cultural consultants,” Konietzko said. “Now that we had more time and resources for some projects, we had some discussions and realized doing the traditional thing we’ve been doing, where we’re using Chinese as the rhythm language for the Avatar world. That was great, and we love that stuff, but it didn’t make as much sense with all the kind of real-world cultures that we pull from for inspiration in Avatar. So I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to create a written language for Avatar.’
“So I just locked myself in my office for like three months. But I never like in fantasy stuff when the fantasy language just looks like English in cosplay, you know? It just looks like the Roman alphabet in cosplay. I was really inspired by Hangul, which I had studied when I was working on Avatar in Korea. I built this language that it’s a phonetic language that — if anything can be expressed with IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, it can be translated to Avatarian, and it creates these little Syllable blocks, kind of Hangul. And then I use, like, these really simplified four element symbols as our kind of base radicals for the language.”
Other Avatar Aang reveals from the SDCC panel:
New Legends Will Rise. Avatar: Seven Havens, coming to Paramount+ Oct 9th pic.twitter.com/oKc3zXiLNn
— Paramount+ (@paramountplus) July 23, 2026
- Tagah, the new airbender introduced in the film voiced by Dave Bautista, will be an upcoming playable character in Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, which we gave an 8.
- The movie’s soundtrack will be available to stream on July 25. It’s the first time Avatar music is available the same day the project comes out, DiMartino noted, and teased a physical media release down the line.
- Speaking of physical media, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is getting an art book packed with behind-the-scenes details. It will be available in November.
Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender comes out on Parmount+ Saturday, July 25. We gave it an 8, calling it a “lovingly crafted and gorgeously animated movie” with “action scenes and settings [that] are thrilling and deserved to be seen on the big screen instead of streaming after a scuttled theatrical release and unfortunate leak changed plans that would have made this more of an event for fans.”
Leanne Butkovic (she/they) is an Editorial Project Manager at IGN, where they’ve also written about TV, movies, and games.