At this point, Netflix may officially be producing original content faster than even the most devoted fans can watch it, but that hasn’t slowed the streaming service down. Today, via the Twitter account @SeeWhatsNext (billed as “News about Netflix by Netflix from inside Netflix”), the company announced its plans for a new animated series, written by Futuramaand Avatar: The Last Airbender screenwriter Aaron Ehasz. The show will be called The Dragon Prince, and will involve two princes and an elf assassin on a quest that sounds like something out of an epic fantasy role-playing campaign.
Ehasz was a longtime writer and story editor on Futurama, both on its original run, which ended when Fox canceled the show in 2003, and on Comedy Central’s revival in 2009. Between Futurama runs, he was the head writer and co-executive producer of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, the anime-inspired animated series about a young martial artist destined to bring balance to the four elements, and the warring tribes of martial artists who control them. Director M. Night Shyamalan made the series into a widely loathed live-action film in 2010, but the original animated series remains highly respected, and it spun off into a four-season sequel series, The Legend of Korra, in 2012.
Ehasz’s co-creator on The Dragon Prince is Justin Richmond, a game developer on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and game director on Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. In 2017, the two men co-founded Wonderstorm, a multimedia studio working both on The Dragon Prince and on a related game set in the same world. According to the description for an upcoming Dragon Prince panel at San Diego Comic-Con, Giancarlo Volpe, a frequent director on Avatar: The Last Airbender and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, is executive producer on the series.
“The thing I take away from Futurama and The Last Airbender is that the audience is very, very smart,” Ehasz told Polygon in a 2017 interview about Wonderstorm’s plans. “All the details, nuance, and things you build into a story and characters? There may be people who don’t appreciate it, but there are so many out there who do and are paying attention. We’re spending all this time on this series and game making sure those details feel right, and that there are things to discover, and that things beneath the surface are worth it because there are tons of people out there who want and deserve that. We need to make something good enough for them.”
The announcement of The Dragon Prince comes shortly on the heels of the latest news about another animated Netflix fantasy from someone heavily involved with Futurama: Matt Groening’s series Disenchantment is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on August 17th.