Redux Month - Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

We’re looking now at the second of the Percy Jackson film series and the one that would end up being the last of them. Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

Though the leads are still familiar, much has changed around them. Thor Freudenthal (whose name will never stop being funny, when he’s directing a movie based around the Greek gods) has taken over directing and Marc Guggenheim is the new and still only writer of the film. Marc Guggenheim’s last and first project as a writer for film was Green Lantern, and we all know how much I love that film.

I’m a little more lenient to this book however, it has its flaws, it takes too much time explaining things anyone who read the last book already knew, but the story gets moving more quickly, and it isn’t all as melancholy and depressing.

Sadly though, in the spite of the change of talent, the result was much the same. A mixed reception and less money at the box office than its predecessor. Let’s take another look and see if we can work out why

Sequel Baiting #3: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief vs Sea of Monsters

Percy Jackson has had a tough go in movies, a failed attempt at a 5-movie franchise adapting the popular novels by Rick Riordan. And when I say 'adapting' I mean in the loosest possible fashion. The first movie changes some major elements from the first book. With the second, I wonder if the writers had only flicked through the book before throwing it away and working on their script. But this is not a review that will rank these movies as adaptations, I myself have only read Wikipedia summaries of the plot. Both movies had a similar mixed reception, and made a similar amount of money about $220m, but the second one had a higher budget so it was seen as disappointing. I have seen both of these movies and here are my thoughts.