We found out last week that Disney Branded Television picked up a second season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, in no small part because the series has become a certified hit, with the premiere being the most-watched episode in the U.S. (across all streaming platforms! 110 million hours viewed!) when it debuted. To celebrate the news, the cast and showrunners took part in a panel during the Television Critics Association press tour this weekend to talk about the series, including where things stand in developing the upcoming episodes.
Unsurprisingly, the second season will adapt the events that happen in the second book of the Rick Riordan series, The Sea of Monsters, but co-creator and executive producer Jonathan E. Steinberg shared that the upcoming episodes will also pull in events from the third, fourth, and fifth books. “These books weren’t written all together,” he said, “and I think one of the opportunities with the show is to have each one of these stories take advantage of the material that was arrived at afterward. So, it all kind of feels like it’s cut from the same stone.”
Steinberg also shared, however, that the “recipe” for writing Season Two stays the same. “I think the goal is to take the book and find its soul, and the things that make the experience what it is for a reader. And then try to plant that in the ground a little bit and let it grow into something else,” he said.
The writers’ room is already back in action, with Rick and Becky Riordan once again involved. Steinberg revealed that a couple of scripts are already written and “in really good shape.”
But even though the team is back to work, there was no clear commitment as to when the series would go back into production or who would be joining the cast, though there was a promise that we will see other Olympians. Walker Scobell and Aryan Simhadri, who play Percy and Grover respectively on the show, even shared some fancasting of their own. “We really wanted Christopher Judge to play Atlas,” Simhadri said. “He’s the guy who plays Kratos in God of War.”
Scobell agreed that Judge as Atlas would be “a dream cast” and added two more. “Another one I think is also a big one, [is] Zendaya for Athena,” he said. “That too… but I really liked—I was just watching The Hunger Games recently—I thought Sam Claflin would be a cool Apollo.”
No news yet on when season two of the show will premiere on Disney+, but you can (re)watch the first season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians on the streaming platform right now.
