The walls of the cave stand maybe 30 feet high, encircling a space that is more than big enough for a giant — and certainly big enough for the eight or 10 people discussing camera positions and stunt blocking for scenes to be filmed in the coming days.
They’re producers and department heads on Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which in December 2024 is deep into filming its second season at the aptly named Mammoth Studios in Burnaby, British Columbia. In addition to the cave — the home of the giant, blind Cyclops Polyphemus — the show’s massive primary soundstage on this day holds a couple other important sets for season two: the Admiralty Suite on the cruise ship Princess Andromeda and part of the hull of a Civil War-era ironclad used to navigate the Sea of Monsters.
On an adjacent stage are the ornate, Art Nouveau-inspired main hall of CC’s (aka the goddess Circe) spa and resort and interiors for Big House at Camp Half-Blood. All of them are richly detailed — and huge. The scale of the sets is in keeping with a general leveling up for Percy Jackson in season two. Based on The Sea of Monsters, the second volume in author (and series co-creator and executive producer) Rick Riordan’s initial five-book series, season two’s tone becomes somewhat more serious as the story — a quest to save Camp Half-Blood from being overrun by outside forces — raises its dramatic stakes.
The bar is similarly higher for Disney+ and the show’s creative team. Season two premieres Dec. 10, two years after the first installment became the streamer’s most popular series to date that doesn’t carry Marvel or Star Wars branding. Disney has mounted a sizable promotional campaign for the new season and gave the series an early renewal for a third season, which is in production.
“It is an important franchise for Disney+ and for the company, and we certainly see real opportunity for the world that Rick has created,” Disney Branded Television president Ayo Davis tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I will tell you that right now, we really are focused on launching an amazing season two and getting season three right for the fans.”
It’s not hard, however, to see the outlines of a fully realized, homegrown franchise in Percy Jackson, even if those wheels turn slowly.
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The tale of Percy Jackson and the Olympians‘ journey to Disney+ has been told many times, but to summarize: Riordan’s best-selling book series was published by Disney’s Hyperion imprint, but film rights went to 20th Century Fox. The studio produced a pair of movies based on the first two novels but made a host of changes that disappointed the books’ large fan base (and Riordan himself, who wasn’t involved with the films). After Disney acquired 20th in 2019, the company took a do-over on the material in series form, with Riordan as a co-creator (alongside Jonathan H. Steinberg) and executive producer. Steinberg and Dan Shotz are the showrunners.
The first season premiered in December 2023 to mostly good reviews and an eager audience: It spent eight consecutive weeks on Nielsen’s top 10 chart for original streaming series, racking up almost 73 million hours of viewing time in the United States in those weeks. Disney+ renewed the show shortly after season one concluded, but writing, production and a lengthy, VFX-intensive postproduction period meant a two-year gap between seasons.
A season three pickup came much sooner, in March. Filming began in August, which will put the show on track to have a between-seasons gap much closer to a year than two years.
“It was wonderful to feel the support to go into production on season three before season two even premiered,” says Karey Burke, president of 20th Television, which produces Percy Jackson and the Olympians. “We’re going to be able to get season three on in a year — I’m so happy for the fans that they aren’t going to have to wait as long from now on.”
It also assures that the young stars of the series won’t be playing the characters into their late 20s. “We don’t want Percy with a beard,” executive producer Craig Silverstein jokes. Walker Scobell, who plays Percy, did have a noticeable growth spurt between the first and second seasons — not necessarily a bad thing for a show about adolescents. Too much of that on a slower production schedule, however, would run the risk of taking viewers out of the story.
“Last season it was like a year or year and a half [gap between filming],” says Leah Sava Jeffries, who plays demigod Annabeth Chase. The early renewal cut the time down to about six months between seasons two and three, or as Jeffries puts it, “It was like, ‘OK, bye guys!,’ and then it felt like three minutes later [we were back].” The shorter hiatus suited her, she says, “because I was still able to really be in my character. From the first season to the second season, I kind of had to jump back into it a lot, just because of how far away the filming was. I love going back quick. I love working.”
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On the day THR was on set, the cast and crew were set up at a former dairy plant a short distance from Mammoth Studios for filming on season two’s seventh episode. The site was playing the interior of the Princess Andromeda, where Annabeth is being held by Luke (Charlie Bushnell), a fellow demigod and her former big brother figure who, it’s revealed at the end of season one, has turned against the Olympians and is working to resurrect the Titan Kronos.
As she and Scobell run through several takes of the scene, other members of the cast rehearse for an upcoming fight sequence — including Dior Goodjohn, who takes on a more central role in season two as Clarisse, Percy’s season one nemesis turned reluctant ally this season.
“The stunts this year have been amazing,” she says. “We have so many good fights, and aside from that, there’s just a lot of really good physical acting this season, which I like. I didn’t get to do as much of that last season.”
Clarisse also plays a key part in perhaps the biggest action sequence the show has tried so far: the chariot race at Camp Half-Blood. Readers have been anticipating the race for some time — and Disney+ has teased it in a trailer and other promotional material — but the scale of it is beyond anything the series attempted in the first season.
“They actually made a giant chariot track,” Scobell says. “Actually getting to ride the chariots and fight on them — it’s weird. In my mind, when I’m talking to people about it, I don’t think of it as like, ‘oh, I was pretending to do it.’ I feel like I did. The chariots were awesome. The armor was so cool. It’s one of those things that just feels so awesome to do it. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
The show’s crew built a quarter-mile track and seating in a field near the camp set — and brought in real horses to pull the chariots. The actors took part in filming some of the race scenes, though stunt performers were of course a key part of the sequence and VFX came in later.
The use of real horses rather than CGI ones, director and executive producer James Bobin explains, did create a logistical issue. “I learned very early on that there was a rule about filming with kids and horses and chariots,” he says. You can at no point have in the same shot a live horse and a child on a chariot. So we had to work that out.”
The young actors have relished getting to do more of the physical work — within limits. Aryan Simhadri, who plays the satyr Grover Underwood, says he was discussing with his stunt double, Vesh Kadlec (“coolest guy ever,” Simhadri says), about how stunt work he could do in a particular scene.
“He’s like, ‘Yeah, you can do the overlap and maybe jump and land on a pad, but I’m going to be doing the stunt,’” Simhadri recalls. “I was like, fine. I didn’t think it was going to be that [intense]. I thought he would just get knocked into a wall and fall to the ground. But he gets picked up a good four or five feet into the air and then pulled down with wires flat onto his back. I could see the wind leave his body on each take. I was so glad I wasn’t doing that.”
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The stunts and the huge sets are all pieces of a more ambitious scope of Percy Jackson and the Olympians in season two — which will also introduce fan-favorite characters Tyson (Daniel Diemer) and Thalia (Tamara Smart) — and all part of deliberate planning by the creative team to go bigger and attempt to top the first season.
A large part of filming on season one used a Volume stage, which allowed for the creation of a host of different environments in one place but also had some limitations.
“You can’t move in and through it,” Silverstein says. “They had amazing solutions in the first season with the tunnel of love and stuff like that, which were changing what the Volume could do. But they had to keep inventing what it could do. A lot of times, because it was just a semicircle, the actors could walk maybe four steps before they had to stop — no walk and talks. Some of these huge sets [for season two], they’re moving through them and inside and out of them.”
Shotz adds that during season one, “there were times when had to rewrite for the Volume, like Craig’s talking about with the walk and talks and certain things that we wanted to do. It was like, ‘All right, how is the Volume going to look best and work for us?’ Then we would adjust certain story points and certain ways we would think about the story for that tool.”
Moving to more physical sets also cut down the number of shooting days for season two, Shotz says, as setups and prep work for the giant video wall on a Volume stage can be very time-consuming. That’s not a small consideration for a series that, aside from Camp Half-Blood and a few other recurring locations, doesn’t have many standing sets.
While “the storytelling is front and center,” Davis says, she notes that Disney Branded TV, 20th and the show’s team have to be “thoughtful about our approach and finding the right balances between the production and the creative. I think we’ve done that really well.”
Burke credits Steinberg, Shotz and the rest of the producing team for keeping costs in line. “There is a version that we could have done for less, but I’m so grateful that we got to make this version,” she says. “We’re in the hands of great producers who have essentially grown the show every season and kept it at the same cost, essentially. For them to figure out how to go from a show set at camp to a show set on the Sea of Monsters, on water, and keep the budget the same was astonishing. That’s outstanding producing.”
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The series wouldn’t exist, of course, without Riordan’s books; The Lightning Thief, the first novel in the series, is now 20 years old and on at least its second generation of middle-grade readers.
He tells THR that while he remains heavily involved in the writing of the series (he’s had several teleplay credits on the show so far), he has also used his time on the show to learn what he doesn’t need to know about other aspects of the production.
“With the first season, I was on the ground learning everything, trying to be dropped into the middle of this new culture and learn all of it,” Riordan says. “The second season was more about, OK, I now know that cinematography is not something I know anything about, and I don’t need to necessarily weigh in on that. They’re fine. They’ve got that covered. The lighting, the music score — I’m not the guy. The scripts? Yes. I can help with the scripts. I can help with the general story arc. I can help with casting, I can help with tone and pacing, those kinds of things.”
Riordan says that before each season, he has reread the book that will be that season’s source material and breaks it down into a rough outline for an eight-episode season. He says the writers have thus far more or less followed those outlines, and the series is a fairly faithful adaptation of the books, but adaptation also means making changes here and there.
“Everything that has been done has been done for a reason that makes sense, and it has been discussed, and it has been approved by me,” he says. “But it’s always a matter of stepping back and recognizing, OK, we’re telling the same story, but some changes are inevitable just because it’s a different medium. TV is a great medium for this because it allows us more time to explore the whole book over the course of a season, [but] that time is not infinite. It’s not possible to do a transliteration page by page. We’d need five years and a billion-dollar budget for just one season. That’s not reasonable.”
What the show has built so far seems to be working. In addition to the show’s success with viewers, it won eight awards at the Children’s and Family Emmys earlier this year, including best young teen series and honors for writing (for Steinberg and Riordan’s pilot script) and directing (for Bobin, also on the series premiere). A lot of the show’s viewing has come from kids and parents watching together, a particular point of pride for Disney and the producers.
“I think my aspiration for the show was for it to be something that had something to say to everyone — that as a kid, you felt excited about watching with your parents, and as a parent, you felt excited about watching with your kids,” Steinberg tells THR. “And if you don’t have kids, you got into it, maybe unexpectedly, as well. When it came out, and when we started hearing from people that it was one of the only things they were watching with their family, that was really gratifying. That was really the target we were trying to hit.”
To a person, everyone involved with Percy Jackson and the Olympians says making a good show is the primary concern. But with season two on the horizon and a third well into production, the show could become a full-fledged Disney franchise.
“It’s good to think about bed sheets and Halloween costumes,” Shotz says with a laugh. “The importance for us on the franchise side of it is to make sure that it honors the show. With Rick and Becky [Riordan, also an exec producer] and their team, we’re there to make sure that everything that’s put out there, whether it’s merchandise, or if they do anything with parks and cruise ships and everything else, how do we make sure that the show is protected?”
Disney has taken some steps into other arenas recently: In the week before the show premiered, the company launched an official Percy Jackson online shop, and on Dec. 9, a Percy Jackson-themed island will debut in Fortnite.
“Priority number one is getting multiple seasons of this series [produced] and getting this initial story right,” says Burke. “It’s been so gratifying to have it so embraced and to feel like it fits so seamlessly alongside the other brands in the world of Disney. That is a tall order. When we put ‘Disney’s ____’ on a show, it had better live up to that. I feel really proud and confident that Percy does. We have been meeting with our partners in the consumer products and the parks divisions, and with the Imagineers about what are the other worlds of Percy that we can imagine beyond the series. That work is all happening now.”
Riordan also has numerous other book series: The related Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo series follow Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and he’s also written multi-book series centered on Norse (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard) and Egyptian (The Kane Chronicles) mythology.
Riordan says he’s had “lots of conversations” about adapting other books of his, but nothing is imminent at the moment (Netflix had been developing a set of feature films based on The Kane Chronicles but scrapped the project last year). For now, Riordan is still marveling at seeing his books come to life on screen the way he envisioned them.
“I kind of can’t believe that this little story that I wrote for my son is now the day job for 500 people every day, who are out there with tractors plowing a chariot track in the middle of a farm somewhere in British Columbia,” he says. “All of these people training on horses and building chariots — it’s just hard for me to wrap my mind around the number of people that it takes to create the world for the screen. … It’s a great honor. The main thing is, I’m happy for the fans of the books who grew up with these stories and these characters to finally, I hope, see an adaptation that they will really love. That was what I was waiting for.”
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