Percy Jackson Is Already Getting A Second Season On Disney+?
Rick Riordan, the creator of Percy Jackson, is working with the writer's room on Season 2, even though Disney has not picked up the show for another season.
Disney’s cost-cutting measures are impacting everything from Star Wars Galatic Starcruiser to the slate of MCU programs, which makes it even stranger that Percy Jackson might already be getting a second season. According to Rick Riordan, the award-winning author behind the best-selling book series, he’s already in the writer’s room working on a second season even before Disney gives it the green light. This is either confident or fool-hardy, and to the author’s credit, he knows it might be all for naught, but he’s excited for the series to debut and is willing to put his work where his mouth is.
On his website, Riordan explained that the writer’s room is working on adapting the second novel, Sea of Monsters, for the show’s second season. This includes informing Glynn Turman, the actor playing the centaur teacher Chiron, that the Party Ponies will appear after being left out of the lackluster film adaptation. Already, the Disney+ series sounds more faithful to the novels than the films, and involving the series’ author as a regular writer is the right way to go.
Percy Jackson Season 1 follows the plot of The Lightning Thief, but since it’s told over the course of eight episodes instead of under two hours, it goes into much greater detail. Walker Scobell takes over the lead as Percy Jackson, while Leah Sava Jeffries is the new Annbeth, portrayed in the films by Alexandra Daddario. Joining them is the satyr, Grover, played this time by Aryan Simhadri.
The adult half of the cast is an amazing murderer’s row of talent, featuring Jason Mantzoukas (Dionysus), Megan Mullally (Alecto), Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hades), Timothy Omundson (Hephaestus), Jay Duplass (Hades), Adam “Edge” Copeland (Ares), and the late Lance Reddick as Zeus, King of the Gods. Following his passing just a few weeks ago, this will be one of Reddick’s final appearances on television.
Disney is taking a big swing with Percy Jackson following the abysmal failure of the last movie, which killed the big-budget franchise. The books are consistently New York Times best-sellers and have been so successful that Rick Riordan has even branched off and started writing about Egyptian mythology with The Kane Chronicles and a series of mystery novels called The 39 Clues. If the first season of Percy Jackson is a success, the House of Mouse could be in business with the prolific author for a long time.
These days, it’s, unfortunately, a big “if,” as the current Disney+ original lineup hasn’t been faring too well. While The Mandalorian is popular, it’s lost ground over the years, and the MCU hasn’t had an entry since She-Hulk, which was controversial, to put it delicately. Someday, another original series will be able to overtake Bluey,
If that’s Percy Jackson, though, we won’t know until 2024 when the first season will debut. Rick Riordan and the other writers are working well ahead of schedule since any word on a second season pickup will likely have to wait until after the first season debuts, and Disney can analyze the streaming numbers.
