Disney's New Fantasy Series To Rival Percy Jackson Can Last At Least 8 Seasons

The news that Disney is working on a fantasy book adaptation to rival Percy Jackson & The Olympians was already exciting, but the fact that the show has enough source material to last a whopping eight seasons or more is truly thrilling. The fact that Disney’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians skyrocketed into Netflix’s top 10 the day that the show became available to stream on the streaming service proves two things.

One, Netflix’s decision to license Disney shows paid off handsomely, and could continue to do so now that Disney’s own Wednesday clone Coven Academy has fared better with critics than Netflix’s original Addams Family spinoff. Two, Percy Jackson & The Olympians deserved its massive blockbuster budget. The second screen adaptation of author Rick Riordan’s series of young adult fantasy novels, Percy Jackson & The Olympians had an estimated season 1 budget of over $100 million.

With each episode of the show costing almost twice what an average episode of HBO’s seminal classic Game of Thrones season 1 cost, there were a lot of concerns about whether Disney’s big investment in Percy Jackson & The Olympians would pay off early on. However, the show’s astronomical streaming success, as well as the numerous viewing records broken by season 2’s arrival, explains why Disney is now doubling down on this approach with its upcoming Artemis Fowl series.

Disney's Artemis Fowl Series Has Plenty Of Books To Adapt

Released in 2001, Irish author Eoin Colfer’s novel Artemis Fowl became a bestseller and spawned a staggering seven sequel novels in the years between 2001 and 2012. Colfer wasn’t quite finished with the franchise’s fictional world yet, as 2019 saw the arrival of a trio of new books, the Fowl Twins trilogy, that continued the story of the original eight-book Artemis Fowl series.

Colfer’s Artemis Fowl novels were critically acclaimed as well as becoming international bestsellers, which was why the slow development of the franchise’s movie adaptation was so tough to understand. After a lengthy 19 years in Development Hell, Artemis Fowl was finally released on Disney+in 2020. To say that the movie was a disappointing disaster would be putting it mildly.

Director Kenneth Branagh’s live-action Artemis Fowl adaptation stripped the original story of its spiky moral ambiguity, turning the title character into an unambiguous hero and flattening the edge of the novels in the process. Insensitive stereotypes abounded, along with outdated tropes and a starry cast who seemed to have no idea how to salvage this costly, ugly train wreck.

Artemis Fowl Is Better Suited To An Animated TV Series Than A Movie

It didn’t take Branagh long to bounce back, with the one-two punch of his autobiographical family drama Belfast and 2023’s Agatha Christie adaptation A Haunting In Venice proving he retained his credibility as both a blockbuster director and an Oscar-worthy writer. However, it took a little longer for Disney to take another stab at Artemis Fowl, with Colfer announcing a Disney Channel animated series at New York Comic Con 2026.

With eight original novels to adapt, not to mention the Fowl Twins trilogy to potentially cover in the future, this ambitious fantasy show has no shortage of source material. Furthermore, the franchise was always better suited to an animated adaptation than a live-action movie, as the creative freedom of the animated format allows the creators to bring Colfer’s vivid world to life in more detail.

As Branagh’s ill-fated movie proved, the same world that felt immersive and original in the Artemis Fowl books runs the risk of looking cheap and gaudy onscreen. Thus, since Percy Jackson & The Olympians has already given Disney a massively successful live-action show based on a series of bestselling fantasy novels from the 2000s, Artemis Fowl can now become an ideal animated alternative.

Release Date June 12, 2020

Runtime 115 Minutes

Writers Eoin Colfer, Michael Goldenberg, Adam Kline, Conor McPherson