The Percy Jackson show is still very much in the works for Disney Plus, although it’s not coming together anywhere near as quickly as fans of the source material would have hoped. The episodic adaptation of Rick Riordan’s popular novels was officially announced in May of last year, but as far as we know, the Mouse House’s top brass are still in the process of approving the pilot script.
In January, Riordan offered an optimistic update, but even under ideal circumstances we won’t be seeing Percy Jackson back on our screens until next year at the very earliest. After all, once the pilot script is given the okay, there’s still the small matter of recruiting a writing team, showrunner, directors, cast and crew, without even thinking about the complicated and effects-heavy nature of the shoot itself.
We’ve heard in the past that Percy Jackson is going to cost Disney a pretty penny, and the latest rumor is that it’s going to have a budget comparable to The Mandalorian and WandaVision. The first season of the Star Wars spinoff ran up a tab of $15 million per episode, and while the numbers behind the MCU’s maiden streaming series haven’t been publicly disclosed, speculation has pegged it to be as high as $25 million for each of the nine installments.
The Percy Jackson movies cost roughly $90 million apiece to produce, and it sounds as though the first season of the TV show will be in roughly the same ballpark. That may seem like a lot, but it’s to be expected when we’re talking about a high-profile Disney project full of gods and monsters, with the platform going all-out to deliver the highest quality content possible when streaming is now the main priority.
