With Disney+ releasing the teaser of its highly anticipated series, “Percy Jackson & the Olympians”, the conglomerate is yet again surrounded by gossip on how the once beloved media giant is starting to reek of corruption.
Disney boasted the series having a budget of 12-15 Million dollars per episode which is similar to the budget of the award-winning show, ‘The Mandalorian’, however that is the only similarity that strikes between the two as the clips released by Disney+ themselves prove to be nothing but mediocre. Big budgets often carry with them big expectations, and with this adaptation, having a budget which could rival a small country’s GDP, touted as a chart breaker, has left us with a bitter taste of disappointment rather than anticipation.
The story, set in a world of magic and mystery, accommodates in itself countless potential but the teaser proves itself only to be generic. One of the fans moved to reddit to complain how everything from the streets to the beaches look so generic and the environment looks dull and lifeless. The effects looked phony and cheap, and the cast assigned fails to give the persona of the characters the fandom has cherished. This brings us to the question of where the budget is going as everything feels like a halfhearted and mediocre attempt at producing what feels like a mere cash grab. The costumes come out as shabby, especially in the scene where Percy is welcomed in the forest which houses ‘Camp Half-Blood’, a major element of the plot. The armor plates look similar to what one can find in a high school drama and the cheers are so hushed that we can question if he is even being welcomed or not.
The suspicions of corruption swirling around Disney are a grim reminder of how even the most pure and beautiful entities are not immune to the corrupting influences of power and self-interest. We hope that the actual episodes prove all of us to be wrong and do not follow in the footsteps of their predecessor, the Percy Jackson movies which due to similar shortcomings proved to be both, a critical and a commercial disaster, resulting in the adaptations being called off.
The story originally follows twelve-year-old Percy Jackson who is on the most dangerous quest of his life. With the help of a satyr and a daughter of Athena, Percy must journey across the United States to catch a thief who has stolen the original weapon of mass destruction — Zeus’ master bolt. Along the way, he must face a host of mythological enemies determined to stop him. Most of all, he must come to terms with a father he has never known, and an Oracle that has warned him of betrayal by a friend.
