It’s pretty much a guarantee in Hollywood: if a book series is popular enough and involves elements of magic, fantasy, or adventure, it’s getting a big screen adaptation. It’s a plan that has worked well for entertainment over the years. After all, the Harry Potter franchise is one of the biggest movie franchises of all time, as are The Lord of the Rings films. But there’s another beloved book series that got the big screen treatment and instead of launching an epic franchise on the silver screen, what we got instead was a pair of highly divisive films that still leave fans with mixed feelings 13 years after the last one hit theaters and now, they’re both leaving Netflix in just a few weeks — just ahead of the critically acclaimed Disney+ series adaptation of the same series’ return for its third season.
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The movies we’re talking about are 2010’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and 2013’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. The films starred Logan Lerman, Alexandra Daddario, and Brandon T. Jackson as Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood respectively. Both movies did well at the box office and they received praise for their action sequences. But the thing that largely held the movies down and doomed the idea of a larger franchise was that the movies deviated greatly from the source material, Rick Riordan’s beloved series of fantasy novels. It would be a decade before fans of the Percy Jackson books finally got a faithful adaptation when Disney+ debuted it’s series Percy Jackson and the Olympians in 2023. But for those who want to go back and appreciate the movies — or see how different they are from the television series, you’ll want to do so fast. They’re leaving Netflix at the end of the month.
Sea of Monsters Tried to Learn From the Criticisms of the First Movie But It Wasn’t Enough
When The Lightning Thief debuted, fans of the books weren’t exactly thrilled. They took issue with the changes the movie made, namely in how the movie aged up the characters (something that completely changed the tone of the story) and even other details, like the color of Daddario’s hair as Annabeth. By the time the second movie, Sea of Monsters, arrived, they tried to make some changes. The second film had a new director with Thor Freudenthal, and while they couldn’t exactly make the characters youngers, they did tweak a few things. Daddario’s Annabeth was blonde for the sequel, and the film brought in characters that they had excluded from the first film. Still, fans didn’t sign on and while a third film was considered, it ultimately never came to be.
In retrospect, while even Riordan himself has been critical of the movies, the two big screen Percy Jackson movies aren’t bad. They’re just different. With The much more faithful Disney+ series available for fans to dig into and stick close to the beloved books — the third season will take on the third book in the series, The Titans Curse, and finally give fans a story they’ve been waiting for since the third movie was passed on — it’s much easier to appreciate the good things about the movies. As critics noted at the time, the action sequences were solid and Lerman’s Percy is actually quite good, even if older than you’d expect him to be coming from the novels. The movies might not be the books, but they are still worth your time. Just don’t wait too long to check them out before they leave Netflix on October 1st.
