Ranker Spotlight: 'Percy Jackson & The Olympians'
Apparently out of nowhere, the young adult fiction adaptations of the 2000s and 2010s are back with a vengeance. November saw a new Hunger Games film for the first time in almost a decade, while streamer Max is producing a TV reboot of J.K. Rowling’s incredibly popular Harry Potter series. But while both these adaptations found tremendous success at the box office, Disney+ will be reviving another series of stories that had a tougher time in theaters: Percy Jackson & the Olympians.
Of the five novels in Rick Riordan’s original novel series, only two — Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters — were adapted into movies. That’s thanks in large part to disappointing box-office returns, particularly for the second film. So as studios prepare to cash in on millennial nostalgia with these rebooted adaptations, why does Disney still want to turn Riordan’s books into a live-action series? Perhaps because the streamer is willing to do what the producers of the film adaptations weren’t: market their adaptation to fans of the novels.
Successful Adaptations Appeal to the Bookworms
As the graph above shows, the movies that made the most money tend to also have the strongest Affinities with their respective novels. For example, the first four Hunger Games movies grossed a total of $2.96 billion, meaning each film earned an average of $740 million. Insights tells us the Hunger Games franchise has an Affinity Score of 563 with the Hunger Games novels, meaning fans of the movies are roughly 6X more likely than the average voter to also be fans of the books.
By contrast, the original Percy Jackson movies earned an average of roughly $212 million apiece, and their fans have zero Affinity with the original books. Taken together with the lower Affinity Scores that The Maze Runner and Divergent franchises had with their respective books, these findings support the argument that adaptations fail when studios don’t successfully market to readers of the novels. And while we can’t be certain of just how concerted the effort to market the movies to Percy Jackson bookworms was back in the early 2010s, the fact that Rick Riordan refused to even watch the movies suggests that these campaigns were probably a lost cause, anyway.
And while there’s been plenty of hay made about the decline of readership in the US, we know that the audience for Riordan’s series is sizable. Its fans are numerous enough to have voted it nearly to the top of lists like The Best Young Adult Adventure Books (11K votes), where it sits at #2, as well as The Best Children’s Book Series (19K votes), The Best Young Adult Fiction Series (8K votes), and The Best Young Adult Fantasy Series (11K votes), where it’s ranked #3. With the books outperforming great literary works like The Brothers Karamozov and Ivanhoe on The Top Must-Read Books Of All Time (585K votes), there’s absolutely no reason not to try to reach as much of this audience as possible.
Reaching Fans of the Books
So how can Disney effectively target Percy Jackson fans? By not just seeking out those who love this particular series, but also fans of the novels, movies, and TV shows that these fans are more likely to also love.
Those who love the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series are 4X more likely to also love both The Hunger Games novels and the Harry Potter books — though they slightly favor The Hunger Games. They’re also 3X more likely to love C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Mortal Instruments series from Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis, while they’re 2X more likely to love The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, The Giver by Louis Lowry, and Holes by Louis Sachar. The tastes of these fans extend beyond the world of young adult novels — Percy Jackson fanatics are also 2X more likely to be drawn to literary classics The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Count of Monte Cristo.
When it comes to TV and film fans, Disney+ may have to wrest some subscribers from Max to build its audience for Percy Jackson. Fans of the books are currently 4X more likely to love the Harry Potter franchise and 2X more likely to love Game of Thrones, both of which stream on the platform formerly known as HBO Max.
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