Today, we at Knight Edge Media exclusively learned that award-winning Japanese-American composer Takeshi Furukawa has been tapped to compose Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action series. Furukawa is currently composing music for the comedy Mythic Quest on Apple+. As well as helping with the music on Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Wars: The Clone Wars in the early 2000s. However, he is best known for his music for the video game The Last Guardian in 2016. For this, he won a multitude of awards including IGN’s Best Original Music of the Year award and a BAFTA Games Award for Music nomination.
Over the last several months, the composer followed showrunner Albert Kim along with directors Michael Goi, and Roseanne Liang (she follows him back) on Twitter & Instagram, including liking several casting announcements in September 2022. He also mentions on his official website that he has several upcoming television shows he is working on. When we reached out to his reps and Netflix for comment, they could neither confirm nor deny the story.
Original composer Jeremy Zuckerman was going to adapt his animated music for the live-action series when Bryan Konietzko and Michael DiMartino were still attached as showrunners. However, when they decided to leave the project in 2020 for Avatar Studios, so did Zuckerman. He is currently working on all the music for the upcoming animated projects coming out of Avatar Studios. James Newton Howard composed the score for M. Night Shaymalan’s The Last Airbender in 2010, which was considered one of the few highlights of the film. It’s unknown if Furukawa will have any additional help on the music from any other composer, much like Howard Shore helping Bear McCreary on The Rings of Power.
UPDATE: Takeshi Furukawa confirms on Twitter he is indeed scoring the live-action series for Netflix.
It is a tremendous honor to announce my involvement on Netflix’s epic live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and truly humbled to receive stewardship of the incredible themes from the original series. We are hard at work to elevate this to new heights, so stay tuned!
We also were given confirmation by Netflix that the original themes from the show will be used in the live-action series.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has no set release date
