Halo of ‘The Last Airbender’ continues to haunt director.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: After making his first foray onto the small screen with Fox’s “Wayward Pines,” M. Night Shyamalan appears hooked, telling IGN that he’d like to make the sequel to his 2000 box office “Unbreakable” a television series instead of a feature film.
“Could you do a six-episode Unbreakable series on Netflix or HBO? Yeah! That’s cool,” he said. “I even had an idea of doing a story that goes in one form, and a second part that’s in another form, and a third one’s in a different form. You never do the same form. It would be like, movie, then, let’s say, cable, to TV, whatever, and then a play; it goes straight online, and it finishes like that. It’s in four different forms, and it never goes back to the old one. It could be kind of cool,” he reiterated.
A sequel for Shyamalan and star Bruce Willis has been mooted for more than a decade, but with no resolution. Earlier in the year, Shyamalan told Collider that he was definitely interested in making a sequel to “Unbreakable.”
“I love those characters and I love that world, he stated. “Of course, the whole world makes comic book movies now. At the time, it was completely novel. I remember when I made it, Disney was literally like, ‘Comic books?! There’s no market for comic books!’ That’s all they make now,” he continued.
“Wayward Pines” marks the first time Shyamalan has garnered a positive critical reaction in years, and his success with the medium may encourage him to pursue his idea of an “Unbreakable” serial or miniseries.
However, the Indian American director continues to defend one of his most panned and universally reviled films of all time: his silver screen adaptation of “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
“It’s really weird because on the show the average age was, like, nine-years-old,” the director told IGN. “My child was nine-years-old. So you could make it one of two ways: you could make it for that same audience, which is what I did, for nine and 10-year-olds, or you could do the Transformers version and have Megan Fox.”
Fans of “Unbreakable” can only hope Shyamalan is ready to move past the half-decade-old stink of “The Last Airbender” and get cracking on a worthwhile sequel to the film.