CREATOR EXCLUSIVE
Author Rick Riordan on how he ensured the Percy Jackson series got his stories right
→ DISAPPOINTED FANS DON’T often get a second chance when a beloved book gets botched in a Hollywood adaptation. Take the legions of readers who adore author Rick Riordan’s YA fantasy series Percy Jackson & The Olympians, who are still smarting from director Chris Columbus’s 2010 retooling of The Lightning Thief into an aged-up movie that barely resembled the source work.
Movie Percy only survived two instalments, while Riordan went on to sell more than 180 million copies of his six-book saga about a boy who learns that he’s the son of Poseidon.
But that kind of success makes studios like Disney incentivised to try and get it right, which is why Percy Jackson And The Olympians has been reimagined into a Disney+ series with Riordan and his wife, Rebecca, executiveproducing. The first two episodes immediately presented fans with a far more bookfaithful story, along with age-appropriate portrayals of Percy (Walker Scobell) and his magical besties, Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries) and the satyr Grover (Aryan Simhadri).
Fixing what wasn’t broken is a big part of why Riordan signed up to be a creative on the series, working alongside showrunners Jonathan E Steinberg and Dan Shotz.
“The film and TV industry is rightly nervous of doing things that are child-centred, because there is a worry that a story with children as the main characters will not appeal to adults,” Rick explains to Red Alert. “But being able to keep the tone, the humour, the sense of wonder and the coming of age elements [of the books] has really made all the difference in the world with this series.”
The Lightning Thief is chock-full of gods, monsters, creatures and magic, all parcelled out across eight episodes by Rick’s own hand. “I had done an outline, and we never really deviated from that too much,” he says. He adds that readers will also get some new material, seeing how Percy’s mother Sally (Virginia Kull) and Poseidon (Toby Stephens) first met, as well as a lot more of Annabeth’s back story. “It was really nice to have the luxury of developing that in the later episodes, and watching the three kids come together as a team.”
Speaking of his trio of leads, Rick says, “We went into this in agreement that our first priority was to protect and nurture our three kids; that was what this village was about. A secondary goal was to create a great television show. But we had to make su
