The small screen adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians debuts on Disney+ with two episodes on Wednesday. According to Deadline, the first episode will also be available on Hulu through January, which is when the eight-episode first season will conclude.
According to Deadline, season one follows the events from the first book of Rick Riordan’s (The Heroes of Olympus, The Kane Chronicles) original five book series. The producers of the show hope that the series will have five seasons, one for each of the books. There’s no official news for a season two. However, executive producer Jon Steinberg (Jericho, Black Sails) told Deadline there’s already been behind the scenes meetings about potentially having more seasons of the series.
“I think everyone has a real hope that this will live a long and healthy life. Right now, we’re trying to deal with step one. But we’d be lying if we said there weren’t people who are thinking about step two right now,” he said to Deadline.
According to Deadline, Becky Riordan, who executive produced the series with her husband, said that they started to outline season two around Sea of Monsters.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is the second adaptation of Riordan’s novels and the first attempt by Disney’s after their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in March of 2019 (20th Century Fox owned the screen rights of the books).
According to Deadline, Riordan stated that he was very displeased about the creative liberties taken with his source material in the film adaptations. After four years bringing this new adaptation to life, Rick told deadline he was very happy with how the series turned out and he can’t wait for audiences to experience this version of his books.
According to Deadline, Disney rarely releases viewership data on Disney+, though it’s expected that they will make an exception to show how well the series was performing. Percy Jackson has all the momentum in the world to be Disney’s next big franchise.