"Everything leaks." That was the blunt takeaway from Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender director Lauren Montgomery at San Diego Comic-Con 2026 on Thursday, as she walked a packed panel audience through one of the film's earliest and most chaotic production stories.
The painting that got repainted before it leaked anyway
The story starts with what Montgomery called the "Avengers shot," an early concept image of the aged-up Team Avatar posing together. When Paramount approached the production team about presenting it at CinemaCon in 2024, production designer Jake Panian was skeptical from the start.
"Jake is, like, 'Absolutely not. It's gonna leak,'" Montgomery recalled. "They're like, 'No, no, no, no. It won't leak. Everything's safe.'" Panian's response was to repaint the entire image before the event, determined that if it was going to leak, it would at least look the way he intended. And it did look better. And then it leaked anyway, captured on a cell phone from an awkward angle, before circulating as unofficial-turned-quasi-official artwork across interviews and posts.
"Good time," Montgomery deadpanned.
The anecdote set the tone for a panel that was equal parts behind-the-scenes candor and genuine creative passion. Montgomery then walked through a slideshow of early character design work, including an Aang sporting a chinstrap beard, multiple rounds of Zuko hairstyle experiments, and several Sokka iterations. The note on Sokka, apparently consistent across revisions: "Don't let Sokka get TOO hot." A pregnant Katara and a Toph decked out in a metalbending police uniform also made appearances, though Montgomery confirmed the pregnant Katara design was eventually set aside.
Why the film stayed hand-drawn in a 3D world
Avatar co-creator Bryan Konietzko took the panel through the team's early conversations about animation style, and the answer they almost landed on was very different from what ended up on screen.
"We just assumed: It's a feature film... people are doing really stylized, beautiful things with 3D characters," Konietzko said. "So we just assumed initially, 'Oh, I guess that's what we'll do.'" Then, by his own account, it just hit him.
"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.'" Konietzko pointed to the broader industry pressure that pushes Western animation studios toward 3D even when artists want to work in 2D, framing the choice as a small act of preservation: "We're trying to keep this art form alive a little bit longer."
The panel was attended by fellow Avatar co-creator Mike DiMartino and most of the film's core voice cast.
Building Avatarian from scratch
Konietzko also detailed one of the more ambitious under-the-radar projects from the Avatar Studios era: creating a fully functional written language for the Avatar universe called Avatarian.
The previous approach used Chinese as a rhythmic stand-in language for the world's written text. With more time and resources at Avatar Studios, and in consultation with cultural advisors, the team decided that approach no longer fit the expanded, multi-culture-inspired world they were building. So Konietzko locked himself in his office for roughly three months.
The result is a phonetic system built on the logic of Hangul, the Korean writing system Konietzko studied while working on the original series in Korea. Any sound expressible through the International Phonetic Alphabet can be translated into Avatarian, which groups into syllable blocks similar to Hangul's structure. The four elemental symbols serve as base radicals within the system.
"I never like in fantasy stuff when the fantasy language just looks like English in cosplay," he said, explaining the drive to build something genuinely functional rather than decorative.
What else came out of the SDCC panel
The Avatar Aang panel at SDCC 2026 packed in several other reveals beyond the production stories:
- Avatar: Seven Havens, a 26-episode 2D animated series following a new post-Korra earthbending Avatar, got its first trailer and an October 9 release date on Paramount+.
- Tagah, the new airbender voiced by Dave Bautista in the film, is joining the roster of Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game as a playable character.
- The film's soundtrack streams July 25, with a physical media release teased for later.
- An art book packed with behind-the-scenes material is coming in November.
The key here is that this panel did more than recap production trivia. It laid out the creative philosophy behind a film that had a genuinely rough road to release, from a scuttled theatrical run to multiple leaks reshaping how audiences first encountered it. If you want to dig into more anime-adjacent gaming content while waiting for the film to drop, the Anime Overload codes guide is worth a look for free in-game rewards, and our full gaming guides hub has plenty to keep you busy through the weekend. For a completely different kind of strategy challenge in the meantime, the LEGO Fortnite Ninjago ink locations guide covers everything you need to craft Master Spinjitzu Scrolls before the next event window closes.
