Percy Jackson and the Olympians has a new lease on live-action life. Over one decade after its final attempt as a feature film franchise, Disney+ greenlit a serialized adaptation of Rick Riordan’s best-selling books. Rather than attempt to squeeze 22 chapters of The Lightning Thief into a movie runtime, Disney+’s Percy Jackson has the luxury of playing with eight episodes of streaming television for each story. Like popular young adult franchises Harry Potter and The Hunger Games before it, Percy Jackson‘s action-packed endgame has already been written, but the team behind the Disney+ series is in no rush to get to that epic finale.
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Disney+’s Percy Jackson Will Be Patient
The House of Mouse is about to kick off a new saga.
Speaking to ComicBook.com at New York Comic Con, Percy Jackson and the Olympians showrunners Dan Shotz and Jonathan E. Steinberg emphasized that Season 1 very much hones in on The Lightning Thief narrative specifically, giving it the power to stand on its own.
“We knew book one would be the first season, so we got to go on this journey of that book and know that we needed to fit it into this box, but we also needed to pace it in a way that made it feel like we were moving,” Shotz said. “It’s an adventure. It’s a ride. It’s like a journey across America. We needed to make sure that fit into this box.”
“When we took this on, and I think when we first started to get to know Rick and Becky (Riordan), I think the promise was made that a lot of care was going to go into this,” Steinberg added. “This wasn’t really about just trying to get the book on screen or just trying to get something to market, but it was about trying to really embrace what was special about the experience people had with the books and find a way to translate that. I think everybody from the studios, from 20th to Disney+, to Rick and Becky and our team really embrace that this was going to be something that was cared for.”
That care does not mean just being faithful to the source material but giving each of the five installments room to breathe.
One of the many issues fans took with the Logan Lerman-led film adaptations in the early 2010s were that they tried to cram too much into each movie. This was especially apparent in Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013), as that movie expedited multiple significant events from later books far before they were given proper set up.
And while Disney+’s Percy Jackson is prepared to take its time telling its stories, Steinberg noted that he and Shotz made sure that Season 1 plants those later story seeds so they can fully blossom down the line.
“I think part of the job was being aware of setting the table,” Steinberg saod. “Making sure that everything was in the right place and that the right actors were in the right places for this to live a long life.”
Those seeds are a blend of Easter eggs explicitly stated in The Lightning Thief pages, like Thalia’s tree, as well as new nods specifically created for the Disney+ series, such as the early debut of gods Hermes (Lin-Manuel Miranda) and Hephaestus (Timothy Omundson).
“We have the luxury of having now six books to tap into,” Dan Shotz said. “We were able to look at things of what we could seed early in the first season. What could we find, characters or gods, that aren’t necessarily in the book that we want to pull up? We definitely explored all of that.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians premieres on December 20th on Disney+.
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