When it comes to Season 2 of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” creator Rick Riordan and the writing staff aren’t too worried about fan backlash.
The pair of “Percy Jackson” films from the early 2010s — “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” and “Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters” — took some flak from the “Percy” faithful for making various changes to the stories in Riordan’s novels. Perhaps most notably, the first movie casts Logan Lerman, who was 17 years old at the time, to play Percy, who’s 12 at the start of the first book. The Disney+ version of Percy is played by Walker Scobell, who was 14 when the show premiered in 2023.
With the series thus far, Riordan — who’s also an executive producer on the project — has generally hewn closer to the source material.
“I think we were fairly confident that most of the tweaks that we had done [for the series] would be well received,” he told The Radio Times. “I think everyone on the team is very mindful of the legacy of the books and the audience and what they’re expecting. So, while I don’t think we feel imprisoned by that, I do think we all feel a sense of obligation toward the material. Everyone’s coming at it from the same point of view, which is really lovely. I mean, any time you translate from one media to another, you have to make changes.”
Both of the aforementioned “Percy Jackson” films garnered mixed reviews from critics and audiences, and the box office for 2013’s “Sea of Monsters” wasn’t enough for the studio to greenlight a third entry in the series. Meanwhile, the Disney+ show is setting viewership records for the streamer.