While fans of Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians have been excited for Season 2 of the hit series pretty much from the moment the credits rolled at the end of Season 1, the anticipation is heightened for reasons beyond the return of a beloved show. For Percy Jackson fans, the upcoming season presents a chance for Rick Riordan’s beloved novel, The Sea of Monsters, to finally get a proper adaptation after the 2013 film left a lot to be desired. Now, Riordan himself is weighing in on how the series is righting the course — and says things are only getting better even into Season 3.
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Riordan, who notably strongly disliked the Percy Jackson movies (including Sea of Monsters) and at one point even said the scripts were like his life work going through a meat grinder, sat down with ComicBook ahead of the Season 2 premiere and explained that he understand the adaptation process better now — but that he’s also glad that he has the opportunity to make changes for the Disney+ series that serve Percy Jackson fans old and new as well as the story itself.
“It is nice mostly in the sense that now that I’ve gone through the process, I understand how things can go off the rails so quickly and all the various ways that an adaptation can go wrong,” Riordan said. “I understand it now so I don’t take it as personally like I once did. It’s lie, ‘okay, I get it, I get why that happened’ but I’m also very grateful that I get to be part of the process now and do my best to sort of shepherd it in the other direction so yes, it’s something that yes general viewers will like but also that fans of the books will enjoy.”
Riordan Says Adapting Percy Jackson for Disney+ Is A Work in Progress (But It’s Only Getting Better)
Riordan also explained that he and the Percy Jackson team are learning more about how to take the Percy Jackson novels from page to screen as they go along and are learning to adapt to particular quirks and challenges along the way — including how to translate Percy’s specific voice in the books to something that works in the series. For Riordan, it’s something that is only improving and will be even better in Season 3, production on which is currently underway.
“I think that I’m learning still as I go and the team as a whole, we’re learning how to do this particular story better as we go from season to season,” he said. “I see that in Season 2 strongly and dare I say in Season 3, which is well underway it’s even better. One of the ways is how we translate Percy’s voice from the books into the show and how do you take a first-person narrator and his sense of humor which is mostly internal in his head and turn it into a show where you can’t really do that the same way as well. So, we’re learning how to give Walker the best material we can to let that voice come through and Walker’s extremely good at taking that material and turning it into quintessential Percy Jackson. It’s a matter of fine tuning at this point. The humor, the pacing, these are the things that I keep coming back to as things I want to keep working on.”
As for what sort of changes to the books that are Season 2 specific, Riordan didn’t give away any spoilers, but he did reveal how some of the pacing will be different in the first few episodes as compared to what fans are used to in the books. He also explained that shifts allow for the show to get more perspectives now that they are outside of Percy’s head, something that really only enriches the story.
“Early on in the first episodes it’s fairly abbreviated from the book and that’s because, for a number of reasons, I mean for one it’s important to get right into it and to remind people what happened last season but to get right into the action so you can care about the characters so it’s a much faster pace than even what’s in the book,” Riordan said. “There’s also some monsters that are mentioned like, you know what, that was in the movie, we don’t need to do that, that’s not important, let’s focus on the things we haven’t seen yet that the fans are looking for. Those are some examples. And some of the payoffs were being able to be outside of Percy’s head and see the story, the same story, but from different points of view, like what’s going on with Clarisse, while Percy’s over here, what’s she doing and in a tv show, you can do that, you can jump from person to person so you’re seeing the same story but from multi dimensions.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians debuts Wednesday, December 10th on Disney+.
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Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
