Netflix's new number one TV show is the biggest since Fool Me Once
The film version was a car crash, but Netflix's take on this animated classic is doing just fine
Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender TV show has proved one of 2024's pleasant surprises, and audiences seem to be down for the adventure too.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has racked-up more hours watched in its first week than any Netflix show of 2024, except for Fool Me Once. And that show had an unfair advantage.
The first series of Avatar was watched for 153.4 million hours from its release to February 25. And the darn show only came out on February 22.
Here’s where Fool Me Once got the upper hand. It got the full 7 days of Tudum’s chart data thanks to its release timing. But, fair play to the show, it did rack-up an eye-opening 238 million hours.
Still, if we extrapolate Avatar’s four days of stats and string them out to seven days, we could be looking at figures up to an amazing 267 hours. Fool Me Once also likely benefitted from being released when much of the western world was on holiday.
But, hey, we’re just spitballing here.
It’s good news, and not just for Netflix. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a show we had serious reservations about before its launch.
Do you remember the film of the animated series from 2010? It was one of M. Night Shyamalan’s key disaster movies (not in a The Towering Inferno sense), and part of the reason some movie-goers still think of him as a failed movie-maker, despite having made fun and interesting movies for almost a decade.
Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender is not a rehash of that 2010 effort, though.
It is, shock horror, pretty darn good, even if it doesn’t quite match up to the charm of the original animated series from 2005-2008.
While the show has dropped below Rotten Tomatoes’s freshness threshold since we last wrote about it, with a 57% freshness score, there are plenty of good write-ups in there. Gamespot rated Avatar at 8/10, Vox gave it a positive write-up and the Guardian gave it a 4/5.
If you’ve seen Avatar: The Last Airbender content before, besides the 2010 movie, and hated it, this show may not be for you. But if you’ve been on the fence about this update, give it a go.
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