For many fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians book series, the feature film adaptations from the early 2010s were disappointing. The characters were teenaged, the hero’s journey truncated, and it ultimately felt like an icky cash grab. However, the new Disney+ series seems to be the adaptation fans have been longing for. As our reviewer points out, the first four episodes are completely faithful to the books – almost to a fault. Yet, all the choices this adaptation has made, such as making it a TV series versus a film franchise; the bigger budget platform and technology of Disney+; and Riordan’s hand-picked actors to play Percy, Annabeth, and Grover characters all point to this series hitting all the marks it failed to the first time around.
How Percy Jackson Came Home
While a Disney imprint published the Percy Jackson books since its beginning, 20th Century Studios acquired the film rights in 2004 and thus produced the fan-maligned 2010 and 2013 films. Riordan has shared his restricted experience as a consultant on those movies on his blog, along with his detailed notes on the various ways those scripts disregard the books’ spirit. When Disney bought the larger 21st Century Fox conglomerate in 2019, Rick likened those film rights reverting to the Mouse House to it “coming home” on his blog.
Executive Producers Dan Shotz and Jon Steinberg, who were also interested in adapting the books for Disney were also following the saga of the film rights, “It had gotten complicated. We then got a phone call a year-and-a-half later [after the Disney-Fox merger] saying, ‘Rick Riordan wants to think about maybe making this show again. Are you interested?’”
Riordan, along with his wife Becky, and Shotz and Steinberg collaborated throughout the pandemic to bring his beloved characters to life. “We started this four years ago, right at the beginning of COVID. We got to be in this little bubble, the four of us, and just dive into the story and really understand what it means to the fan base, what it means to his family. This is like a third child for them,” Shotz notes.
The goal of any adaptation is to capture the spirit of the source material while helping it adjust to its current time and medium, but that’s a lot easier said than done. The Riordans’ role as executive producers is to “sort of be the police of that spirit to make sure that it's authentic,” Becky comments. “It's not about how it looks or what the characters look like or any of that, but how it feels, how it resonates with fans of the books.”
Rick describes the DNA of his books as a “mix of adventure, a little bit of snark, a good amount of humor, and some heart with the characters really learning what it is to be friends and what it means to be a hero and step up and do hard things.”
A Blessed Trio of Demigods
However, the spirit of the books couldn’t truly be captured without the trio at the center: Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell), Annabeth Chase (Leah Sava Jeffries), and Grover Underwood (Aryan Simhadri). It helps that these young actors have been fans of the books since they were kids themselves. When asked what they related to most about their characters, each listed something that gave some insight into how they approached playing them.
Percy’s sense of humor was most appealing to Scobell, and Jeffries sees a balance of “independence and vulnerability” in Annabeth that she connects to, but Simhadri shares a pretty funny anecdote about his connection to Grover, “I liked him so much when I read the book series. And mostly because he could talk to animals. I convinced myself if I tried hard enough, I could also hear what animals were thinking… and I ended up getting attacked by a pigeon in the fourth grade.”
As mentioned before, the Riordans had no expectation of what the characters should look like, regardless of how they were depicted in the books, and Steinberg and Shotz also felt the same. When asked what characteristics they were looking for in terms of casting the trio, Steinberg chalks it up to Scobell, Jeffries, and Simhadri having the “it” factor. “I tried to be really careful before we started to not come to the process with a preconceived idea of what anybody's target was going to be,” he starts. “I had these characters in my head. They existed on a script page. We just watched these kids and the choices they made, hoping that there were going to be kids who came in and just made it so apparent that they were the kid. There's no manual for how to make sure that happens. We just got very, very lucky that that happened three times with each one of those kids. They all made it impossible to choose anyone else.”
When trolls and self-proclaimed “purists” came out of the woodwork to complain about the casting choices, Riordan directly addressed those ugly comments on his blog. He praised all three of the leads for their performances and what they individually bring to the characters. He also rhetorically asks why his opinion as the creator of these characters is not enough for these supposed fans. As for the time in production with the leads, Rick said in our interview that, “Our primary goal as a production has been to make sure the kids feel supported and that they feel safe and they feel good about what they're doing. The secondary goal is to make a great TV show. So if I've told the kids anything over the last year or two years, it's been, ‘What can we do for you? How are you feeling? Do you need a break?’ But also just, ‘You guys are awesome. You're doing the right thing. Do what you do. We got your back.’ That's really all it is.”
The Nature of Adaptation
It’s fair to say that TV is the ideal format to adapt a sprawling book franchise, and for all parties involved, there was never any question that the Disney+ adaptation would be a series. Steinberg says that it would be too difficult to take this story and adapt it into a 90-minute runtime. “It just doesn't want that.” Rick even acknowledges the easy translation of his book to a series, “I write in an episodic way: we do this, this happens here, and then they go here and this happens. It neatly breaks out into distinct episodes.”
In that spirit, the show uses the book’s chapter titles to name the episodes. The first four episodes are, in order, “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher”, “I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom”, “We Visit the Garden Gnome Emporium”, and “I Plunge to My Death,” effectively covering the first thirteen chapters of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. This gives audiences an idea of the season’s pacing, with the last nine chapters of the first book covered in the later four episodes. “With eight episodes, we have more time to tell the whole story of the first book [...] and even add some things and deepen our understanding of who the characters are,” Rick teases.
The Riordans also had fun toying with the TV format to bring new dimensions to characters and moments he wrote so many years ago, “It was absolutely fabulous,” Becky says. “TV lends itself more to multiple points of view,” Rick adds. “So we just kind of leaned into that. And while it is from Percy's point of view this season, you also get those snapshots of what's going on when Percy's not around.”
In the books, the readers can only get an impression of how those around Percy feel based on his interpretation. Now, in adapting to the television medium, we get a better perspective of the world that surrounds our protagonist rather than only seeing things through his lens.
Steinberg also touches on this idea. “As the show gets deeper into its story, you start to get a feel for which other characters you might want to just spend a minute with.” He particularly praises Simhadri’s performance as Grover as one that inspired a fun one-on-one scene between Grover and Ares (Adam Copeland) that wasn’t in the books. “You wouldn't have known that was going to exist until you watched Aryan breathe life into that character,” Steinberg continues. “And then, once he did, it was the most obvious thing in the world.”
Simhadri also describes that scene with Ares, whose entire plot was left out of the movie. “Adam Copeland killed it as Ares. He was so terrifying. I'm not acting there. I'm sitting in a cafe with him and it's this intense interrogation scene and none of that is fake. I am genuinely scared for my life.” Though Simhadri quickly clarifies, “He’s such a nice guy.”
Speaking of gods, Shotz mentions the advantages of adapting a completed series, “We could really look at where [Rick] was going with the story, which he didn't even have the benefit of twenty years ago. We got to take advantage of that. Even though we are keeping as true to The Lightning Thief as we can, we could also bring gods you might not see until later and hint at them or see them in season one. That was pretty exciting to have that whole well of material to work off of.”
Creating Camp Half-Blood On A New Stage
Equipped with Disney’s production budget and ILM’s newest StageCraft LED Volume stage in Vancouver, the possibilities of how to portray the mythical domains of Hell and Olympus are limitless. Steinberg points out a more subtle use of the Volume that even fooled the professionals. “One of my favorite moments in the show was hearing that there were people in the post-production pipeline who saw the footage of the interior of The Met and didn't realize we didn't just get back from New York.”
“Being able to partner with them across the board for that, and our VFX, our creatures, and our design work, you can't get better than that,” Shotz adds. “All those guys are fathers with kids that were looking at them and being like, ‘Dad, deliver this. Mom, deliver this right.’ There was pressure on that front, but it was worth it.”
“ILM killed it,” gushes Simhadri. “They didn't leave anything up to the imagination unless they had to. All of the huge, big set pieces were really cool. We played Mario Kart on the Volume stage when we wrapped.” When asked who won, both Jeffries and Simhadri reply, “Me,” while Scobell smiles between them.
It’s been a long struggle for fans of the Percy Jackson books to see the live-action adaptation they deserve, but with the Riordans fully and passionately involved, much more time and space to tell this story, and the full force of Disney’s expansive visual effects behind them, it seems like everything is smooth sailing.
Some quotes have been condensed or edited for clarity.
