Rick Riordan may well be living every middle grade author’s dream right now.
His Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (the second most popular MG (middle grade) series this century behind that one about that boy-wizard) has been adapted into a hit Disney+ series which is both getting rave reviews (96% critic score, 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes) and winning over a huge streaming audience.
Now before you say ‘well it’s easy to make a good adaptation of a popular series’ I would suggest you go off and watch the Artemis Fowl movie, the original Percy Jackson movie, the Seeker Dark is Rising movie and… well… almost any MG adaptation made in the past twenty odd years.
Making a good adaptation of a popular book series is HARD.
(For the record – just to clarify – those movies all have terrible reviews, weren’t successful at the box office and… especially in the case of Artemis Fowl… were executed very poorly).
In the last… let’s say thirty years… I can think of very few really good adaptations of popular MG series.
The Harry Potter series is one (fortunately they put together an excellent creative team for those movies).
The Narnia movies, especially the first one, is another good example.
Beyond that… maybe Bridge to Terabithia?
It’s far easier to make a list of failed adaptations (can I add The Giver to that list?)
So how would it feel to be an author of a successful adaptation?
Well, I hope I get to find out one day (fingers crossed) but in the meantime – it’s really interesting to look at Rick Riordan’s own thoughts about the previous adaptation and the current one. It turns out that last time Percy Jackson was adapted (badly), Riordan was working hard behind the scenes to try to stop the filmmakers making bad decisions.
Unfortunately – as the movie proved – he was not successful.
But it makes for fascinating reading. On his blog in 2018, Riordan posted the emails he sent to the producers of The Lightning Thief almost a decade earlier.
Reading through, you can see again and again how politely and carefully Riordan tried to draw attention to the obvious – that the changes the producers were making to his story were going to alienate the audience.
He was a lot nicer about it than I would be.
And of course, the subsequent failure of the Percy Jackson films proved his point perfectly.
are a fascinating look at what it is like to be a successful author – yet still have no control over how Hollywood screws up your work.
(He does mention in the blog that he waited almost a decade before publicly criticising those films. At the time they were released he was outwardly supportive. Although as he points out in his blog - the fact he barely mentions them on his own website might give you a clue as to how he feels about them).
Luckily for Rick, Percy Jackson has been given a second big screen adaptation with the new series on Disney+.
So is it any good?
Actually… yes. It’s fantastic – for a number of good reasons. But I’ll get into those when I give a Percy Jackson review a little later.
Watch this space…
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