Surprise! The “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” TV series is out now on Disney+ and Hulu. Yes, that’s a full day early.
The first two episodes launched at 6:00 p.m. pacific, a fully 24 hours before the originally scheduled Dec. 20 release. And subsequent new episodes, originally slated to premiere every Wednesday, will now debut on Tuesdays at 6 p.m.
“We’re so grateful for the amazing and dedicated Percy Jackson fans who have enthusiastically supported this project from the very beginning. They’ve been counting down the days, and as a special thank you, we wanted to let our fans enjoy the first two episodes a bit earlier than expected,” Pamela Levine, head of marketing for Disney Branded Television and National Geographic Content said in a statement.
Based on the popular series of novels by Rick Riordan, the show stars Walker Scobell as Percy Jackson (the son of Poseidon), Leah Sava Jeffries as Athena’s daughter Annabeth, and Aryan Simhadri as Percy’s secret satyr bodyguard, Grover.
Guest stars include Toby Stephens as Poseidon, Glynn Turman as Chiron, Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hermes, Jason Mantzoukas as Dionysus, Jay Duplass as Hades, Timothy Omundson as Hephaestus, Adam Copeland as Ares and Lance Reddick as Zeus.
Of course, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” isn’t the first adaptation of the books. There was also a pair of poorly received films released in 2010 and 2013. But unlike those films, Riordan serves as an executive producer this time, and as he told TheWrap in October, he has high hopes that the show will be “the antidote” for those movies.
“I don’t know if it’s pressure, so much as I feel a sense of responsibility to the readers,” Riordan told TheWrap during a Chicago tour stop for the latest “Percy Jackson” novel. “I want to do everything I can to do right by them, and make sure that this is a show that they’re going to feel good about, and feel like they recognize and and love and relate to.”
“There’s a lot of, I guess, pent-up wish fulfillment about having an adaptation that really sort of reflects the books. And I think — I hope — this series is going to be the antidote for that,” he added.
Riordan also wrote the first two episodes with Jon Steinberg; James Bobin directed them. Steinberg and Dan Shotz serve as executive producers alongside Riordan, his wife Becky, The Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Bert Salke, The Gotham Group’s Jeremy Bell and D.J. Goldberg, James Bobin, Jim Rowe, Monica Owusu-Breen, Anders Engström and Jet Wilkinson.
