There’ve been a lot of kids books that have been announced to be getting their own TV adaptations, but few are quite so anticipated as Disney’s upcoming Percy Jackson series. Based on Rick Riordan’s five-book series that later became an entire media franchise called Camp Half-Blood Chronicles, the show cast its three leads — Walker Scobell as Percy, Aryan Simhadri as Grover, and Leah Sava Jeffries as Annabeth Chase — earlier this summer. While the show is still a ways off, the three kids showed up D23 with a teaser in hand.
In the books, Percy is a Half-Blood, the child of a human and Greek god — in this case, Poseidon. The teaser gives a brief look at the summer camp where he and other demigods (like Annabeth, whose mother is Athena) train their growing powers. But being the kid of a god puts a target on your back: Percy’s own existence violates an old oath made between Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. The first of what is hoped to be many seasons will be adapting The Lightning Thief, the original novel that first released in 2005.
If Percy Jackson sounds familiar to you without ever having read the books, that’s because a pre-Disney 20th Century Fox tried adapting the franchise. That didn’t last long — the two films starring Logan Lerman did decently at the box office, but Fox never got around to doing a third instalment. (From the sound of things, the films fizzing out was to everyone’s benefit.) Once Disney snatched up Fox in 2019, they announced their plans to do a TV show the following year. Unlike with the films, Riordan is notably pretty involved with the show.
Along with Scobell, Jeffries, and Simhadri, the show’s cast includes Jason Mantzoukas, Glynn Turman, and Virginia Kull. Since the show only recently started filming, Percy Jackson & the Olympians has a tentative release date of “soon.”
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