Find out why the Percy Jackson franchise in theaters came to an end before the release of a third film
One of the most beloved literary sagas of all time is “Percy Jackson and the Olympians”, created by the author Rick Riordan. The work was expanded to other formats, hitting the big screen in two films released in 2010 and 2012, “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief” and “Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters”, respectively, where the title character of the plot was played per Logan Lerman.
But, even though the cinematic plot left loose ends, a third film in the franchise was never released. – Why did this happen?
The truth is that there is a big reason why the sequence did not take shape: public and critical reception. This is because, as it is an adaptation of an already established story, the films were expected to be a huge box office success, as it would attract fans of the plot that emerged on the pages to see the story ‘coming to life’ through real actors. .
However, the films distanced themselves greatly from the original plot, as they changed the characters’ personalities, important figures for the development of the story were excluded, terms and concepts that are part of the work’s mythology were explained in a confusing way, among many other problems. which made feature films fall to the public’s displeasure.
So much so, that the approval level for both films did not exceed the average of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes (a platform that aggregates film and television reviews). The failure also hit the box office, as “The Lightning Thief” grossed US$226 million around the globe, and “Sea of Monsters” grossed less than US$200 million worldwide, as found by Box Office Mojo ( via Screenrant).
More than that, the creator of the saga himself, Riordan, also revealed that he did not like the work done based on his books. In a post on his personal blog in 2018, he revealed that he sent feedback to the team, but that the final script was very far from his work, and for this reason he decided to move away from the plot “for the sake of my mental health”.
In the same post he revealed that he never watched the two films and points out how upset fans must have been to see how the work was portrayed in theaters.
The script as a whole is terrible. I don’t just mean the way it is different from the book, even though it does so to the point of being almost unrecognizable as the same story as the book. Fans of the books will be angry and disappointed. They will storm out of theaters and do terrible word of mouth. […] The biggest problem is that even if you pretend the book doesn’t exist, the script doesn’t work as a story on its own.”
Source: Recreio
