Percy Jackson And The Olympians Archives

April 12, 2022

“Percy Jackson” Casts Walker Scobell In Lead Role

As we’ve all learned the hard way from J.K. Rowling and the slow-motion train-wreck that is the Fantastic Beasts franchise, giving authors too much creative control over adaptations of their work can be…uh, risky. I say this as a writer who would very much like to be invited onto the hypothetical film set of any hypothetical adaptation of my own somewhat hypothetical fantasy novel, but the truth is that published authors can be a somewhat stubborn lot – convinced they know exactly what’s right for their story and characters, and unwilling to allow professional directors, screenwriters, and casting directors to do their thing.

It’s a good thing, then, that Rick Riordan appears to be the polar opposite of J.K. Rowling – in every way in which an author and a person can be. I try not to use the term “genuinely decent human being” of people I don’t actually know, but Riordan has minded his own business for as long as I’ve been following him on social media, and I appreciate that he seems to know when and how to properly utilize the power of his massive following, and when not to speak at all. That, and I guess the fact that he actually writes awesome queer and trans characters into his books and doesn’t wait for decades to have passed before ever retroactively confirming when a character is gay (I’m looking directly at you, Rowling).

I also appreciate that, while Riordan has made no secret of his disdain for the Percy Jackson films made between 2010 and 2013, and his negative reaction was not at all unwarranted given how badly those films butchered even the most basic themes of his books, he is coming into the new adaptation of Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief for Disney+ with the understanding that there are fundamental differences between writing books and writing for television, and that just because he knows the story better than anyone doesn’t mean he’s necessarily the best person to translate it into a visual medium. He has joined forces with some excellent writers and producers, including Black Sails‘ Jonathan E. Steinberg, Dan Shotz, and Daphne Olive, and Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Monica Owusu-Breen, among several others.

The area in which I’m most pleased to see that Riordan is getting a say is casting – because if there was one thing about the 2010 Percy Jackson adaptation that ruined that movie for me and many other fans (it’s hard to limit it to just one thing, actually), it was the casting of actors in their late teens as characters depicted in the first book as twelve-year old children, completely altering the dynamics of their relationships with each other. Riordan was firmly opposed to the decision to “age up” his heroes, but had no power whatsoever over the production.

This time around, the mistakes that doomed the Percy Jackson film franchise to a swift death won’t be repeated, as Riordan has made the wise decision to look for age-appropriate actors who can grow into the key roles of Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood, alongside a new generation of fans. Yesterday, it was announced that thirteen-year old Walker Scobell of Netflix’s The Adam Project has joined the production in the role of Percy Jackson himself – and the enthusiastic response to the casting even from adult fans of the books is proof, if any was needed, that this was always the correct approach to take.

I suppose I ought to explain what the books are about. Percy Jackson is an urban-fantasy series that hinges on the intriguing premise that all of the gods and monsters of ancient Greek mythology are real and very much alive in the present day, where they take frequently amusing disguises. Percy Jackson himself is a demigod, the only known son of Poseidon, god of the sea. He gets mixed up in a war between the gods after being implicated in the theft of Zeus’ prized lightning bolt, and has to battle Medusa, the Minotaur, Ares, and other characters both iconic and obscure on his journey to Los Angeles to find the true Lightning Thief and clear his name.

Along the way, he’s joined by Annabeth Chase, a daughter of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Grover Underwood, a timid satyr tasked with protecting demigods from monsters. Annabeth and Grover have yet to be cast, but Riordan has promised that those and other announcements are not far off. Personally, I’m most interested to see the actors playing the Greek gods – something about the 2010 Percy Jackson film that bothered me to no end was how the director and writers took everything that was funny and clever about Rick Riordan’s descriptions of the gods and simply…stripped it all away.

As for whether Walker Scobell will make a good Percy Jackson, I finally started watching The Adam Project last night (Scobell’s only film to date, available on Netflix), and while Ryan Reynolds is every bit as grating as I usually find him to be, Scobell is honestly delightful as the younger version of Reynolds’ character – he’s snarky, funny, and expressive, with great comedic timing and a natural gift for monologuing. With slightly darker hair, that’s Percy Jackson right there.

I always worry for child actors joining major franchises and potentially becoming targets for bullying and harassment from adults, but for some reason I want to believe that the Percy Jackson fandom is…I don’t know, relatively more chill than other fandoms where this has been a problem. Despite having read all the books, I haven’t interacted with very many Percy Jackson fans, so I just don’t know, and at this point I’d be a little scared to dive in.

So anyway, what do you think of Walker Scobell’s casting, and how excited are you for the new Percy Jackson series? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

September 12, 2020

“The Kane Chronicles” Are Coming To Netflix!

Author Rick Riordan has quickly become a hot commodity in Hollywood, a status I’m sure he never thought he’d achieve after the complete and utter embarrassment that was the feature film adaptation of his Percy Jackson And The Olympians series in 2010. Following the recent announcement that Percy Jackson will find a better home on the Disney+ streaming service (where it will be adapted as a series with the potential for multiple seasons if when the first one does well), Riordan has managed to complete a deal with Netflix that will allow the streaming giant to develop feature films out of all three books in his fabulous – but criminally underrated – Kane Chronicles series.

The Kane Chronicles were Riordan’s second foray into the world of urban fantasy, as he deftly wove Ancient Egyptian mythology into a modern setting, pitting a team of diverse protagonists led by Carter and Sadie Kane against the Egyptian serpent Apophis, a seemingly indestructible force of pure evil capable of swallowing the sun and ending life as we know it. The series has received less attention than Percy Jackson’s exploits in the universe of Greek and Roman mythology, but is no less well-written, funny, or surprisingly educational. Carter and Sadie, biracial twins descended from a long lineage of Egyptian magicians, travel across the world battling gods and monsters from the mythos, learning spells, and uncovering secrets about their powers. The Kane Chronicles are perfectly suited to a film adaptation: and Netflix definitely has the money to make the Egyptian setting come to life with appropriate grandeur and spectacle.

It will be important to make sure that Netflix doesn’t attempt to whitewash either Carter or Sadie Kane, or any of their extended family. Rick Riordan himself got into a quarrel with several of his publishers in European countries after cover art for the books featured both protagonists as white, prompting the author to clarify that Carter is canonically a “dark brown” African-American young man, while Sadie is lighter skinned. Netflix has similarly faced accusations of whitewashing over the years, as have most film and television studios, but Rick Riordan’s involvement in the project gives me hope that he’ll keep a close eye on these and other important issues. That being said, the extent to which he is directly involved is still unclear: Riordan’s official announcement on his social media was only a few seconds long, too brief to provide many crucial details, and his website provides only a little more, noting that he started corresponding to Netflix in October.

One thing is clear, however. While in the books it’s at first implied and then later confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that The Kane Chronicles and the Percy Jackson series exist in the same universe, that won’t be possible here because…well, Netflix and Disney+ are separate, competing streaming services. This definitely won’t impact either series (in the Percy Jackson series, Egyptian gods are never referenced as far as I can remember, and in The Kane Chronicles there are a few scattered hints about something happening in Manhattan, but nothing actually substantial in the main books themselves: Carter Kane and Percy Jackson would only first meet up in a short story written by Riordan, which was followed by two more crossovers), but it does mean that any hopes of one vast, Percy Jackson Cinematic Universe under the Disney+ banner are impossible. Goodbye, PJCU…we hardly knew ya. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is sure to disappoint a bunch of fans.

Assuming both series’ are handled respectfully and Riordan is able to work closely with the producers and creative teams, we should see two separate adaptations of his work that both offer a much better vision of his extensive world and worldbuilding than the 2010 Percy Jackson movie could ever have accomplished. I have high hopes. While I’m nervous about how Netflix will adapt The Kane Chronicles, I can’t deny I’m wildly excited to see characters like the Egyptian gods and goddesses (Bast, the cat goddess and Kane family guardian, was always my favorite) finally brought to life with all the heart and humor that Riordan always intended. It’s a good time to be alive, if you’re at all a fan of Riordan’s mythos.

So what do you think? Did you read The Kane Chronicles, and if so, who are you most excited to see make the jump from page to screen? Share your own thoughts, theories and opinions in the comments below!

May 14, 2020May 14, 2020

Rick Riordan Developing “Percy Jackson” For Disney+!

It’s been a long wait, but the hopes and dreams of Percy Jackson fans worldwide (and there are a lot of them, as shown by the way they’ve taken over Twitter) have finally been realized – bestselling author Rick Riordan and his wife announced today that they have convinced Disney to adapt Riordan’s Percy Jackson And The Olympians series: a series many regard to be every bit as iconic and formative as the Harry Potter and Hunger Games books, and that, with a dedicated and faithful approach to the source material, could have just as much success onscreen as both those franchises.

But whereas both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games have only had one, definitive adaptation, Percy Jackson is different in that it was adapted once before – and fans of the books, including Riordan himself, were almost unanimous in declaring that the two films derived from the first two books in the series were badly-written, badly-cast, and just….well, bad. After the two films’ poor reception, the planned franchise (then owned by 20th Century Fox) quickly dried up, and any hope of a proper reboot seemed lost. Until this year, when Rick Riordan started casually dropping hints on his social media accounts that implied he had been meeting with Disney executives to discuss the possibility of a reboot – and now, at last, it’s finally here. It’s happening. And it might just be good.

The new adaptation will be a series, planned to debut on Disney+, the studio’s streaming platform. Riordan announced several details about the series: it will be a multi-season commitment, with each season covering one whole book in his original, five-part series (though there will likely be room for spinoffs, perhaps even ones adapting Riordan’s other series’ set in the same universe as Percy Jackson, such as Heroes Of Olympus and The Kane Chronicles, if this series does well). The first season, for instance, will consist of the entirety of the series’ first book, Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief. For those of you not in the know, allow me to give you a quick rundown of the story (and let me assure you, I am not some poser copy-and-pasting summaries of the books from Wikipedia pages: I was and still am a big fan of Riordan’s work, and I own copies of all of his books, all the way through to The Trials Of Apollo. In fact, I’m so much of a fan that it drove me mad that I had to use images from others of Riordan’s books to fill out this post: unfortunately, there’s not enough images solely of art from Lightning Thief).

The Lightning Thief sets up the saga of Percy Jackson, a twelve-year old boy when the story opens (very important point, we’ll get back to that), who quickly discovers that he is the secret son of Poseidon, the ancient Greek god of the ocean – which makes Percy both a demigod and a “half-blood”, a term applied to all characters in the series with one mortal and one immortal parent. Percy is swept off to Camp Half-Blood, where he encounters a host of other characters with similar backgrounds – but, for the first few books at least, Percy is the only demigod whose parent is one of the “Big Three”: that is, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades (not to be confused with the Hades who will soon show up in Disney’s live-action remake of Hercules). His supporting cast includes Annabeth Chase, a strategical, ingenious daughter of Athena, goddess of wisdom; Grover Underwood, a satyr entrusted with protecting Percy’s life from various mythological monsters (one of the best things about Riordan’s work is that he uses some truly obscure characters from the myths, rather than just exploiting the big names like Medusa, The Minotaur and The Hydra – in fact, those three monsters, despite being the most popular, are probably among those used the least overall in the series); and Luke Castellan, a son of Hermes and one of the senior members of Camp Half-Blood’s management alongside the immortal centaur Chiron and the expelled Olympian Dionysus, who goes by “Mr. D” while on earth. This core cast of characters is expanded as times goes on, and, of course, they are joined from time to time by a number of Greek gods: all of the pantheon, from Zeus to Hestia, show up in some form or another, and some play integral roles in the plot. These gods are on the brink of open war when the story begins, and Percy Jackson gets drawn into the middle of their conflict as a pawn, while trying to locate a dangerous artifact stolen from Zeus’ possession.

Obviously, any adaptation of a work is going to make changes – that’s why it’s called an adaptation, and not a word-for-word translation. But most agree that the Percy Jackson series needs a more faithful adaptation than whatever it was we got in the film duology: in the films, Percy and his friends are all angsty teenagers rather than kids, and their humor is more coarse and adult than the witty style that Riordan wrote into his books; the films use overexposed and frankly boring monsters in place of some of Riordan’s more creative choices – one particularly awful instance is when The Hydra is employed as a substitute for Echidna and The Chimera, two far more compelling monsters; the gods are depicted as stereotypical Greek warriors of gargantuan stature, when in the books one of the defining features of the gods is how human they are – Poseidon wears tacky Hawaiian shirts and enjoys fishing, while Ares is a hyper-aggressive macho biker and Zeus is a permanently dour middle-aged man in a pinstripe suit; and the story is unnecessarily convoluted by the introduction of a new quest to find magical pearls that, in the books, is summed up in a single scene.

Needless to say, fans demand and expect better from Disney – what we (I feel comfortable saying we, because I do regard myself as a hardcore fan) expect is a series that highlights the best aspects of the books and reminds us just how much they meant to us, growing up. Percy Jackson made me into a Greek mythology buff, and I have retained all (or at least most) of the knowledge I obtained when, after reading the books, I would immediately set about researching every single mythological character referenced in the books, from Kronos (Lord of the Titans, imprisoned in Tartarus after brutally murdering his own father and then subsequently being brutally murdered by his own son, temporarily defeated by a hairbrush) to Kampê (demonic, scimitar-wielding entity ordered by Zeus to keep watch over the hundred-handed Hecatonkheires on Alcatraz Island). Thankfully, Rick Riordan assured us all that he will be supervising the development of the series, and will be on-set regularly to make sure everything is going smoothly, and his artistic vision is being respected.

I am also certain that Riordan, who has recently established himself as a progressive voice in young adult (YA) literature, will also insist that Disney includes far more diversity than he himself wrote into his first series of books. For example, several characters from his first series are confirmed, in more recent books, to be on the LGBTQ+ spectrum – but I think Riordan will at least try to have those often emotional coming out scenes happen sooner, rather than later. Similarly, I expect there to be several more female characters in the first season of the series than just Annabeth, Percy Jackson’s mom, the camp bully Clarisse, and a scattering of monsters and nymphs. I will also be interested to see if Grover, one of the few characters racebent for the film adaptation, will go back to being a white character in the reboot, or if Riordan will choose to keep that one element from those otherwise easily forgettable adaptations (though, if they do choose to make Grover black in the Disney+ series, I hope his portrayal will be more sympathetic this time, and less borderline overtly racist caricature).

As a side-note, I also just want to point out that I have several fancasts already brewing in my head, and I may feel the need to share some of them with you in another post somewhere down the line. So be on the lookout for that.

What do you think about this idea? How do you feel about Rick Riordan’s close involvement with the series’ production? What do you expect to see from a Percy Jackson show? Share your own thoughts, theories and opinions in the comments below!