Lauren Montgomery

Those really looked like a million bucks.

So many of the talent working on this have been really passionate Avatar, Last Airbender and Korra, you know, artists that have worked on this franchise for many, many, many years, including like the director of this movie, Lauren Montgomery, had worked on the original show from season three.

I believe she storyboarded a lot of it.

and a bunch of like stuff that we really like which is Justice League and Justice League Unlimited on DC.

And that's what I mean.

These people, James Gunn, Jeremy Slater, and Sammy Birch.

And Dave Green, who was the director, they knew that the only way this movie was going to work is if they kept that hyper focus alive, because that is just basic character drama, character development and character writing.

And it's incredibly difficult to have a character who does not speak.

Mm hmm.

And so as fate would have it, a friend of ours, Lauren Montgomery, was storyboarding.

She had taken freelance storyboard.

Sam Liu was another friend of ours who was directing.

The screenplay was written by Tim Hedrick and Chris Yost, who Chris Yost I know from a couple other stuff.

Um, worked with Marvel a lot recently, and then director is Lauren Montgomery, and she did storyboards and stuff for Korra.

They did recast at the direction of those two.

And Mae Whitman, who played Katara originally, said that she was happy that she was recast because someone who is not white should be playing that role in this day and age.

And today, we are talking about the Paramount animated film Avatar Aang The Last Airbender.

Directed by Lauren Montgomery, the film premiered in July 2026 in a couple of select theaters, but primarily on the streaming service Paramount+.

The film takes place 13 years after the original Avatar The Last Airbender series, and follows the gang into their adulthood as they start to build a fledgling republic city and settle into their adult responsibilities.

But as ancient artifacts and scrolls lead Aang to the mysterious Avatar Sonam, he soon discovers another Avatar-made iceberg containing Taga, an airbender lost to time.

and that is Avatar Aang the last airbender oh yes

this is a feature-length Avatar movie directed by Lauren Montgomery who is from the DC world Batman year one is a movie Justice League doom you know that kind of stuff and this is the first new Avatar content that we've gotten in in a, a really long time.

Yeah.

Um, this is from the original, uh, the original guys who created the avatar franchise.

This week we have a very exciting, very exclusive moment for you.

I don't know if you all have checked out the conversation that we had with Mike and Brian and Lauren when we were talking about the Avatar Aang The Last Airbender film, but if you were paying attention, Mike DiMartino dropped a little breadcrumb about how there might just be the novelization of the film, and we perked up so fast, we started, our fingers were typing, typing, typing, making phone calls, sending out hockey, trying to get as much information as we could, because we knew that we wanted to give you this exclusive look, and we have a conversation coming at you right now with the phenomenal author of the novelization of the phenomenal film.

It's Alison King.

Hello, Alison.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Where in the process do you come into it? Because we had Mike DiMartino and Brian Konietzko and Lauren Montgomery and a bunch of other folks who worked on the film, we do know that there was, it was a very long process and there were indeed a lot of pieces of story that just didn't make sense to squish in to this one movie, so they really, you know, needed to figure out where their focus and concentration were going to be and really make it about Aang.

And so that's kind of how this conversation came up, is I had said, like, you know who I'm fascinated by is The Denied.

Yeah, that's-

Um, did I tell you, uh, did, did this get cut? So apparently Lauren Montgomery was offered to work on Sailor Moon, and she was like, "No." I don't remember if that made the interview or not, but it was very funny.

But it does feel very, like, I rem- when Batman: The Animated Series was made, like, that version meeting Superman made no sense.

And then when he was-

You want...

Well, stuff's already happening.

Listen to my interview with Lauren Montgomery.

Well, they, they, what-

Before getting into question of the week responses, which was what DC character would you like to see an HBO series be made of? I want to make sure everybody is aware if they missed it in their podcast threads.

I had an over hour long conversation with Lauren Montgomery, the director of the of I almost said Legend of Aang.

Avatar Aang, The Last Airbender.

She also was a showrunner on Voltron, Legendary Defender, and directed so much Legend of Korra, as well as countless other things.

Those are a level of detail, Scotty, that I'm not even capable of being able to process that right now.

But thank you to everybody who submitted their question of the week responses.

Again, please check out my interview with Lauren Montgomery.

I worked really hard on getting questions that I just hadn't seen her asked very much.

Oh, absolutely.

When we had Lauren Montgomery and Brian Konietzko and Mike DiMartino on to talk about the movie, these names got dropped plenty.

They got dropped plenty.

And we even have some stuff we want to follow up on that we started talking about with Lauren and Mike and Brian.

So without further ado, please welcome art director Aaron Loftus and production designer Jake Pannion.

Welcome to the

To get started, I mean, we said your titles, but what exactly do

you do? Like you can think of a production designer as designing the production, basically.