I don't know about you, but I thought the film Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was pretty good. I mean it wasn't Lord of the Rings good, but what fantasy movie is? In the end, it was a decent adventure that cleverly combined urban grittiness with high fantasy, and, well, I'm ready for the next chapter. But will there be a next chapter?
Hollywood always does this. Trying to duplicate the success of the Harry Potter phenomenon, it launches series after series based on popular book series, then gets cold feet and abandons them when the first installment doesn't do Harry Potter numbers. Whatever happened to letting a series slowly build a following?
The Golden Compass was a good movie back in 2007, but it "only" made $70,107,728 at the North American box office, soooooo.... cancelled! No more installments.
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events made $118,634,349 back in 2004. Not bad, right? Sorry, not good enough. No more installments!
My personal favorite among these examples was 2008's The Spiderwick Chronicles. Cool little movie from a popular book series. Young adult vibe, but scary, creative, and wonderfully directed. But it's respectable but unspectacular $71,195,053 box office take didn't calm the nerves of its investors, so no go and no future Chronicles.
Will Percy Jackson be the next to suffer this fate? Probably, because once again, we have a decent but not Harry Potter-level box office take (almost $80,000,000 after several weeks in theaters) so I'm betting things won't bode well for our young human/Olympian and adaptations of the remaining Rick Riordan books likely won't happen.
But I hope I'm wrong. C'mon, Hollywood, let things build a little! Make a little less, or maybe even take a loss (horrors!) on the first one or two installments of a series if you really think you've got something, and give the public time to figure out what you've got. It's the right thing to do, and your financial chickens will eventually come home to roost, too. And probably in a big way.
Just, please, no more engaging, polished first installments of a new "series", followed by a big silence.
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