From Page to Screen: Percy Jackson

On the bestseller lists Rick Riordan stood comparison with Suzanne Collins and Stephanie Meyer as a writer of young adult fantasy and science fiction during this past decade. Yet the feature films based on his books have been much, much less successful than theirs commercially. The first Percy Jackson film didn't quite make it to a $300 million world gross, and the second film did not better that, ending the franchise there for the time being, while Hollywood has shown less enthusiasm for a reboot of this particular property than, for example, it has for reboots of well-known superheroes like Superman, Batman and Spiderman.

Considering that--and the dislike many fans of Riordan's books have of the film adaptations--I found myself the more attentive to the alterations made to the material in bringing it to the screen as, having seen the films first, I turned to the first of the books, The Lightning Thief. Percy is made much older in the movie than in the book--the sixth-grader of the novel turned into a high school student. The character list and plot are all simplified--Dionysius, Ares, Cronus are all left out of the events, and the number of incidents with and without them pared down. In particular the more parodic elements were discarded, as with the bit in the Colorado water park, while also excised from those scenes the filmmakers' retained. (In the book the vision of the underworld felt like something out of Mel Brooks--but in the movie it looked much more like What Dreams May Come.) And of course, all this enabled the film to dispense with most of the book's abundance of talky exposition (virtually a course in Greek mythology in itself, which would probably have made a fair-sized portion of the target audience zone out).

The somewhat older protagonist, the simplified, more compact story, the downplaying of the wackiness (and the reduction of the exposition) enabled the producers to achieve a more manageable running time, made the product brisker and easier to follow, and saved on budget. (That fight scene at the top of the St. Louis Arch would not have been cheap to film.) But in the process they sacrificed much of what would have elevated the material above being a rather slight fantasy adventure (the zaniness almost vanished, the bit of drama likewise reduced--so that Hermes' son's betrayal of the hero lost any emotional punch it might have had).

In short, the "safe" approach did not pay off. Of course, it would be nice to think that not playing it so safe would have let the film do better--but alas, that is speculative (and perhaps also a long shot).