In May 2020, author Rick Riordan announced the development of a new show based on his book series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
When Rick Riordan announced this, so many fans were excited to have this series revisited after years since its original release. Many new outlets, including the Texan Times, state the new series has “fast-paced, fun, and comedic qualities”. The first season will be based on the first book, The Lightning Thief, and the series follows the journey of Percy Jackson along with Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood. All the new actors in this franchise have accepted the roles on the shows with grace, showing multiple aspects of the filming of the show on their social media accounts. After this season of the show, the cast is prepared to stay for another four seasons to continue the premise of the novel series. The three main characters of the book series will include Walker Scobell as Percy Jackson, Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase, and Aryan Simhadri as Grover Underwood.
To understand the context of the story, Percy is a young boy who discovers he is a demigod. In the first book, Percy is presented with a quest to prevent a war between the Greek gods, and he needs to recover Zeus’ lightning bolt. The book includes mythical creatures and many figures from Greek myths that he and his friends Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood must overcome. As mentioned before, the Percy Jackson fandom is extremely happy about the show coming out, as some fans believe the original movies produced within the last decade did not efficiently represent the books and did not follow the complete story line. However, with this production, Rick Riordan is one of the producers of the show, indicating his influence on the goals and overall alignment of the show with the books he had originally written. Fans are truly hopeful to see the product that Rick Riordan can recreate!
The release of the show is coming very soon, on December 20th, 2023. Each episode of the show will be about an hour long, and in the first season, there will be 8 episodes to follow the main sections of the book. Although not all information has been released on other future seasons, the actors and other production team members have discussed the beginning of forming the ideas for season 2 of the show with hope of its success!
