After years of waiting, the series based on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians begins this week for those with a Disney+ subscription and/or Hulu subscription. It's been a long time coming for many fans of the fantasy books to see 12-year-old Percy find out he is the son of Poseidon, learn that Greek mythology is alive all around him, and eventually set out on an epic quest. Now that it’s here, the question that comes next is whether the series will finally show Percy’s full journey across multiple seasons, and the producers opened up about the show's future.
As one can imagine, the answer to that question has a lot to do with whether audiences tune into the series when it premieres on Wednesday, December 20 on the 2023 TV schedule and continue to for the subsequent weeks new episodes drop on Disney+ and Hulu. When CinemaBlend spoke to Percy Jackson producers Jon Steinberg and Dan Shotz, we discussed whether making a series that stars growing teens changes the haste with which the series is being planned further. Here’s what Steinberg had to say:
To some extent. But, also they're gonna do what they're gonna do. They're human beings. We're gonna grow and so we're gonna make a show with the kids we have and everything else will fall into place.
Steinberg is not worried about the leads of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians cast growing up. The producer would not get into details about whether the second season, which would cover Sea of Monsters, is being developed yet. However, per the conversation, it sounds like the producers are not handling the show like they are running out of time simply because Walker Scobell is “a few inches taller” now. Dan Shotz had this to say:
One of the benefits, you know, with the hope of making more of these is every book starts a year later. So there is a good time jump between each book. You go to the next summer. So, maybe some growth spurts happen during that time, but these are the kids and they are perfect. So, I'm excited to see hopefully what they can do going forward.
As Shotz pointed out, every new book in Rick Riordan’s series doesn’t pick up where the prior book ended, it jumps to the next summer. So if Walker Scobell, Leah Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri undergo some serious growth spurts or glow-ups between seasons, there’s a realistic workaround for the cast. It’s not unlike the Harry Potter series where each new installment had its young wizards returning from a summer at the start of almost every new book.
As I mentioned to the producers, seeing the first few episodes of Percy Jackson with its main cast finally being age-appropriate, after the failed 20th Century Fox movies, really made all the difference for me in terms of the franchise being more accurate in capturing the spirit of The Lightning Thief. While this cast is going to grow up before we know it, here’s hoping the series becomes successful, so we can finally see Percy, Annabeth and Grover complete their full journeys on our TV screens and honor Rick Riordan’s books at the same time.
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