Any fan of Percy Jackson and the Olympians; The Lightning Thief, a fantasy series about Greek Mythology written by Rick Riordan, could tell you their opinion on the movie. Eight times out of ten said opinion will be that the movie was awful. As a hard-core Percy Jackson fan myself, I one-hundred-percent agree that the movie was indeed horrible. There are several reasons for this.
The first is how the characters and settings appeared in the movie, along with the exclusion of characters that are essential to the plot. Changing characters beyond recognition, or cutting them completely, disappoints many readers. While it is necessary to take some things out, cutting characters who play a large role in the rest of the book or series will confuse the rest of the plot in the adaptation. Many people were angry when the movie was initially released in 2010 because of how the protagonists appeared in the movie. A few characters in particular were especially disappointing. In the book, Annabeth has blonde hair and grey eyes, however in the movie she has red-brown hair. Her role in proving the ‘dumb blonde’ stereotype very wrong is stripped away. Another character’s appearance that is frustratingly off is Hades, god of the dead. In the book, Hades is described as tall, pale and lithe, with greasy black hair, but any description from the book is completely disregarded in the movie, where Hades takes the form of a red, demon-like figure or a curly-haired man who appears to belong in a motorcyclist group. Speaking of Hades, he is the antagonist of the movie, however in the book, the antagonist was Kronos. Kronos was cut out in the movie, despite the fact that he plays the essential role of antagonist throughout the five-book series. Another essential character that was cut is Clarisse La Rue. Clarisse plays a large role in not only the first book, but is also a huge part of the remaining four books in the first series.
Yet another detail that the movie got very wrong was the cabins at Camp Half Blood. It was filmed that when Percy gets to camp, Chiron shows him his cabin, which is on the canoe lake, and tells him that his father, Poseidon, made the cabin for him. Instead, it was described in the book that Percy’s cabin was built by the campers in honor of Poseidon. In the beginning of the book, one of the big mysteries is who Percy’s godly parent is. This is stripped away in the movie when the claiming is taken out and Percy is simply told that he is a son of Poseidon.
One of the most prominent differences that frustrates dedicated readers that the directors made to the movie, is altering the plot beyond recognition. The goal in the book is to retrieve Zeus’s lightning bolt from Hades. To manage that, the main trio, Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood must make their way from Long Island, New York to Los Angeles, California. The movie’s main goal is still to return Zeus’s lightning bolt to him, but instead they have to find three pearls that will allow them to escape the underworld. The quest for the pearls turns into the entire plot, which ends up cutting out many more essential scenes that are mentioned throughout the rest of the series.
No matter how embarrassing the Percy Jackson and the Olympians movie was, there is hope. On August 18, 2022, Rick Riordan announced that the book series had gotten a green light for production as a show on Disney Plus. The show will be released on December 20, 2023 and many fans are excited to see how the first season turns out, and have hope for the new live-action version of their favorite book series that releases on December 20th, 2023.
