If you’ve been hearing excited screaming in the distance lately, a Percy Jackson fan is most likely the source, because after months and months of waiting, hoping, signing petitions, and social media campaigning, a brand new Percy Jackson adaptation is finally coming to Disney+!
On May 14th, Rick Riordan posted a video of himself and his wife Becky across his various social media accounts announcing a live-action series based on the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians pentalogy, beginning with The Lightning Thief in season one.
The books revolve around a twelve-year-old boy named Percy, who suddenly starts getting attacked by monsters straight out of Greek mythology. He comes to know that he’s actually a demigod, and his father is a Greek god. In a turn of events, Percy ends up going on a perilous quest to retrieve Zeus’s stolen lightning bolt.
The first and the second books have previously been turned into movies produced by 20th Century Fox, but they weren’t received well by the fans and both of them underperformed at the box office too. Around 2015, Brazilian Percy Jackson fans started campaigning on social media for the series to be adapted to the screen once again. Over the years, fans from around the world showed a lot of enthusiasm and made #DisneyAdaptPercyJackson popular to the point where they got it trending on Twitter without any prompting whatsoever in December 2019.
When Disney acquired 20th Century Fox and got the rights to Percy Jackson in the process, another adaptation became very plausible, and a few of Riordan’s tweets from December 2019 indicated that he was in talks with Disney executives. It’s evident that millions of fans and the author himself put a lot of effort into making this dream into a reality, and it all paid off!
Riordan assures Percy Jackson fans that this time both he and his wife are going to be intimately involved in the making of the show, and Riordan’s tweet from May 16th suggests that he might even be writing the script!
Meanwhile, the fifth and final book in the third Camp Half-Blood Chronicles series- The Trials of Apollo, comes out in September 2020. In a blog post in April, Riordan also mentioned writing an Irish mythology inspired book next!
OM GOSH! I’m so excited! Also, a little pet peeve, please make Annabeth blonde. It’s not that hard, just get some hair dye, or bleach. And grey contacts.
And age as well