Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief author Rick Riordan will be the first person to tell you how much he didn’t care for 20th Century Studios’ 2010 adaptation of the novel from director Chris Columbus. For years, Riordan’s been insisting to his fans how he’s been longing to see his work transformed into a live-action story that squares with the grand vision in his mind, and now, Disney Plus plans to make that happen.
Though Riordan already announced almost two years ago in a series of now-deleted tweets that Disney Plus was moving forward with a new show based on the book series, the prolific author reiterated today the studio’s plans and shared some new details about the project in a new video posted to Twitter. Along with Riordan, director James Bobin (Muppets Most Wanted, The Flight of the Concords) has signed on to helm the pilot episode, and Riordan expressed confidence in Bobin’s handle of the material, if only because of Bobin’s children being huge fans of the franchise.
While it’s a bit odd that Disney would present this latest update about the newest incarnation of Percy and the Olympians as the first the public’s hearing about it, Bobin’s joining the project and Disney’s decision to actually greenlight the show are the surest signs yet that the thing is actually coming to fruition after all these years. Whether the new series will be any good, though, is going to hinge on the rest of its creative team, none of which has been announced yet.