The Big Picture
- The creative team behind the Percy Jackson TV adaptation feels the pressure to create something that both fans and the Riordans will love.
- Director James Bobin focused on accurately portraying Percy’s growth as a character, particularly as a 12-year-old navigating a traumatic story to save his mom.
- The team wants to honor fans’ emotional investment in the books and work closely with Rick and Rebecca Riordan to deliver an adaptation that they will appreciate.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians is headed back to the screen this December, as Disney+ gears up to premiere its television adaptation of the beloved Rick Riordan books. At this year’s New York Comic Con, creative team from Percy Jackson were on-site to discuss the series and their approach to bringing Riordan’s work to life once again. With prior less-than-savory movie adaptations, the pressure was on for the team to create something Percy Jackson fans will love while also offering something fresh.
During the roundtable interviews at NYCC, director/executive producer James Bobin, executive producer Dan Shotz, and creator/showrunner/executive producer Jon Steinberg shared some of the areas where they felt the most pressure when adapting Percy Jackson. For Bobin, the main challenge was chronicling Percy’s story. He told Collider’s Arezou Amin that he wanted to get “Percy’s growth as a person” right. He said that “Percy doesn’t know who he is when he starts this whole show out, and by the end, he knows exactly who he is.” On top of that, Percy is just 12-years-old and that needed to come through when telling his story.
“That’s a big thing to learn at 12-years-old. […] Because this whole experience of the show through the eyes of a 12-year-old is what the show should feel like. So that journey of his, learning his nature, learning who he is, and then going through this quite traumatic story to save his mom is a big thing. And that, to me, I think was a challenge, and I think hopefully we got that right.”
The ‘Percy Jackson’ Team Wants to Honor Fans and the Riordans
For Shotz and Steinberg, the goal was to create an adaptation that showed fans and Rick and Rebecca Riordan that immense care went into the series. When speaking to The Geeky Waffle’s Candace Kaw, Steinberg noted the responsibility of working on Percy Jackson, saying, “There’s a lot of people who have such an emotional investment in this book, in this world, for whom this story and this character really occupies, and a genuinely important place in not just their memories of reading it but in how they see themselves.” While Steinberg acknowledged “it’s a big deal,” he also thinks it was an exciting pursuit. He also shared that the Riordans’ involvement “in the process to make sure you don’t stray too far makes it a little bit easier not to worry about disappointing people and making it a little bit more about feeling really fired up to show them something that they’re going to like.”
Shotz added that Percy Jackson also needed to be something the Riordan’s would love, especially after Rick publicly expressed his disdain for the movie adaptations. Shotz noted that Percy Jackson is “the baby” for the Riordan family, saying, “[W]e wanted to deliver that for them, as well. But it was also cool that Rick got to look at something he hasn’t looked at in 20 years and [was] able to see what he wanted to pull out of that. So, we got to all join together in that process, and that’s what we feel like we made it really a beautifully collaborative experience.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians debuts with two episodes December 20 on Disney+. Subsequent episodes will release weekly every Wednesday.
