Middle grade author Rick Riordan continues to keep his fans up to date on Disney’s live-action adaptation of The Lightning Thief. The Percy Jackson author has taken an active role in developing the adaptation and has aimed to assuage anxious fans that this adaptation will play out better than the 2010 film.
The latest updates came via Twitter:
While it did get the series trending today, there wasn’t much in the way of news from the tweet itself. We’ve known that Percy Jackson is being adapted into a live-action series based on The Lightning Thief since last year, with Entertainment Weekly reporting just last month that Riordan will co-author a book about the son of Hades, Nico di Angelo, and his partner, son of Apollo Will Solace, with Anger Is a Gift author Mark Oshiro. A Disney Plus adaptation for the popular middle-grade author’s newest book, Daughter of the Deep, was announced last month as well.
An adaptation of book one of The Kane Chronicles, The Red Pyramid, has been in production with Netflix for some time. According to Riordan’s latest blog post on Oct. 24, the project’s producers are in the process of selecting a second screenwriter ahead of a rewrite.
Among the more substantial updates in his latest blog, Riordan shared that he had visited Industrial Light and Magic’s “Volume” stage, which was famously used to film The Mandalorian by rendering background environments in Unreal Engine. The purpose of the visit was to “learn from ILM’s cutting-edge expertise,” so we may see a similar stage used in filming of what the author has started referring to simply as Percy Jackson.
“If all goes well,” the authors writes, “and the full green light happens as expected, we could begin filming in June. We have just delivered the second episode script to the studio and are forging ahead with outlines for episodes 3 and 4, with the expectation that these will be done and approved by January, at which point, fingers crossed, we will get approval for full green-light. In the meantime, though, we are not waiting, and are proceeding forward on all fronts.”
We know that filming is planned to take place in Vancouver and that James Bobbin will direct the series’ pilot episode. On the director, Riordan had this to say:
“He recently directed the pilot for Mysterious Benedict Society, which I loved and found very true to the source material, and he has worked on everything from creating Borat and Ali G with Sacha Baron Cohen to Flight of the Conchords to Muppets to Dora and the Lost City of Gold (which the Riordans [sic] found an incredibly fun adaptation of our beloved Dora the Explorer cartoon from the kids’ childhood.) James knows the Percy books well. His kids are fans. His humor is wonderful. We are in good hands, demigods, and lucky to have him joining our team.”
As the production team fills out and the casting search continues, fans can expect more regular updates from Percy Jackson’s author. In the meantime, the revitalized fandom is having no shortage of laughs about the process.
