Fans of Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender” got extraordinary news in February when ViacomCBS announced it was bringing creators Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko back to expand the franchise with new series and films via the creation of Avatar Studios. The show experienced a boom in popularity during the pandemic when all three seasons became available to stream on Netflix starting May 15, 2020. It was this Netflix-created surge in “Last Airbender” interest that drove ViacomCBS and Nickelodeon to go all in on the franchise expansion.
“‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ was a series that ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon and was never a huge show, but had an amazing following. We licensed that show to Netflix and it exploded,” Nickelodeon president and CEO Brian Robbins recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “Then we put this spinoff of ‘Avatar,’ ‘The Legend of Korra,’ on Paramount+, and it crushed it. That led us to our new relationship and bringing the creators of ‘Avatar’ back to Nickelodeon to form Avatar Studios. We are now on our way to a full-fledged franchise strategy, creating films and spinoffs out of ‘Avatar.’”
Licensing “Avatar” to Netflix paid off in two ways: It proved Nickelodeon should invest in the expansion of the franchise and it drove viewers to ViacomCBS’ streaming platform Paramount+ in order to stream “The Legend of Korra.” As Robbins revealed, it’s not the only time the new streamer got a significant boost thanks to Netflix.
“The second example, which actually has paid off this month, is ‘iCarly,’” Robbins said. “We knew we were going to do a reboot of ‘iCarly,’ it just took us a while to put it together. Once we knew we had it going, we licensed just a season or two of ‘iCarly’ to Netflix and it exploded with new kids discovering it for the first time, and fans who grew up on it rediscovered it. The demand for the new show was at such a fever pitch by the time [the new show] launched that it propelled ‘iCarly’ to be, if not the most successful show on Paramount+, one of the most successful shows.”
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