Percy Jackson and the Harry Potter Marketing Thief
Are you bereft about the imminent cinematic end of Harry Potter, yet Twilight's chastity-belted vampires hold no appeal? You might be interested, then, in a teaser trailer that's been attached to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; from Christopher Columbus, director of the first two Potter movies, it's a film entitled, Waitwaitwait Don't Go Anywhere, We Have, Like, An American Harry Potter Coming Out Soon. My bad, that was the working title. Apparently, it's now named Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Almost as long!
Like the J.K. Rowling-derived Potter films, Percy Jackson is based on a series of children's fantasy books, perhaps the only remaining growth industry in this economy besides "senator's mistress." 3:10 to Yuma's Logan Lerman plays the lead role of a teenage boy transported to Hogwarts Mt. Olympus, where he will eventually encounter a series of Greek Gods essayed by actors like Uma Thurman, Pierce Brosnan, and Rosario Dawson (though none of those stars figure into this trailer). I dunno...it looks capable enough, but I'm going to hold out judgment until we finally see a shot of Thurman as Medusa; here's hoping that two of the CG snakes on her head are voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Kenny, and that they fight with each other while making jokes about timeless pop culture properties like Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
VERDICT: So far, it's all Greek to me.
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Comments
Doesn't hold a candle to this raping, though:
http://tinyurl.com/nqus5p
Way to make the entire trailer the climax of your movie. Genius Fox, simply genius.
Having read both series (Harry Potter and Percy Jackson), it's obvious that the Percy Jackson series took most of its major thematic elements from Harry Potter; I'm not going to list them all to avoid any major spoilers, but I'm not giving anything away to say the adventurers are a trio with the hero, a know-it-all girl, and a geeky male friend. The author (Rick Riordan) pretty much admits it towards the end of the first book with a Harry Potter reference.
However, as my wife puts it, the major "feel" of the books is different, and PJ is no HP. I was impressed at how different the overall story arcs were between the two series. Rick Riordan wrote a great series aimed at kids slightly younger than the HP crowd, and these books are my sons' (8 and 5) favorite books at the moment; I read to them for at least 45 minutes a night because they won't accept any less!
Also, how many stories are out there these days that avoid major thematic similarities? You need:
- A main character. Nowadays he/she has to be "special" in some way.
- A friend or two for the main character, including someone "smart" enough to move the plot along.
- A major bad guy/girl who's planning on world domination/destruction and who is arising from banishment/slaying/what-have-you.
I just described Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson, plus a few hundred (or thousand) other books and series. Yeah, the PJ series is a bit more blatant than most in copying HP elements, but at least it's well-written and entertaining, rather than 99.9% of the derivative dreck they pass off as writing these days.