Rick Riordan On Disney+’s Percy Jackson: “This Is The Adaptation That You’ve Been Waiting For.”

Percy Jackson and the Olympians has only scratched the surface with what it has shown the public. Since production commenced in June, the series has released a couple of official images, dropped numerous teases in various interviews, and even capped off its D23 Expo presentation with a short teaser trailer of Walker Scobell’s titular hero navigating Camp Half-Blood. Since D23, Percy Jackson has returned to Vancouver to resume production, and is tentatively scheduled to wrap its Season 1 shoot in January.

While Disney+ currently has the series set for a 2024 release, author and executive producer has assured fans that this iteration will be worth the wait for a crucial reason.

“The TV format is one of the things that I love the most because it gives us time and space to tell the whole story of the book, The Lightning Thief, in a way that’s a little more true to what I wrote,” Riordan told Entertainment Weekly. “I think it’s what the fans have been waiting for. It’s just so great that I can finally tell all the readers over the years that this is it. This is the adaptation that you’ve been wanting and waiting for.”

Those eight episodes are also being brought to life in grand fashion thanks to Industrial Light & Magic. The storied visual effects company partnered with Percy Jackson and has built a brand-new StageCraft on the show’s set in Vancouver, which it used for production this week.

“This is beyond cutting edge, this stuff that we’re using,” Riordan continued. “To be able to have that as our playground and to have the next generation of that technology to draw on, it’s game-changing what we can do on it.”

Beyond Riordan getting the chance to bring his creation to life in epic fashion, Percy Jackson also gives the author an opportunity to refine what is now a 17-year-old book.

“[The Lightning Thief] was written for my son as a bedtime story 20 years ago, before [Scobell, Leah Jeffries, and Aryan Simhadri] were born,” Riordan said. “It needed a little bit of tweaking and thinking about. All the questions that my fans have been asking me over the years, ‘Why is this this way?’ ‘Why does this person do that?’ Those are things that I can put in this version, and I think that the fans will find new stuff that they weren’t expecting that’s also exciting.”

Fortunately for Riordan, his leading man did not need much of a refresher when it came to the show’s lore. Scobell revealed that he was a fan of the Percy Jackson books long before he was cast in the series.

“My friend Oliver came to school, and he told me I had to read this book,” Scobell recalled. “My bus stop is next to a book shop, and I got the book The Lightning Thief, and I came to school and I started reading it and I loved it. Pretty soon my whole class started reading it, so at recess and lunch everyday we’d just read Percy Jackson.”

Percy Jackson and the Olympians has roughly 13 weeks of production remaining and is expected to arrive on Disney+ in 2024.

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