How Tom Rothman killed the PERCY JACKSON film franchise and ended up at Disney with a big budget

Tom Rothmann he might just be one of the worst studio executives in Hollywood. It’s amazing the kind of brain farts this guy has had over the years. One of his most famous brain farts was the version of Deadpool we saw The origins of X-Men: Wolverine and most recently worked on the adaptation of Unexplored, which was an embarrassingly bad movie. He’s also the guy who fired the Dead Pool solo project for years.

Well, it turns out he’s the reason why, too Percy Jackson the film franchise ended up failing. Screenwriter Craig Titley recently spoke to Variety and talked about the days when Hollywood studios would “buy any book that had three kids chasing monsters.”

20th Century Fox acquired Percy Jackson and signed on the director Chris Colombo to replicate the same level of success he found with the Harry Potter franchising. When the first film came out, however, it was a huge disappointment. So what happened with the franchise and how did it end up at Disney? Tom Rotham happened.

An inside source explained: “The problem was Tom Rothman.” He was “known for making cheap films. So if Harry Potter is what you’re aiming for, you’re automatically hindering the project.”

The source added: “He thought the marketing could sell a well-known book series, so why spend a lot of dollars? But the special effects are terrible. There’s not the edge that the books had.”

Titley confirmed that these budget constraints led to significant rewrites, including changing some of the first book’s most notable moments. Yes, Rothman definitely seems to have a backwards way of thinking when it comes to making movies. He doesn’t really care about the story or the properties he’s worked on and is willing to sacrifice a quality movie for, well… shit. It’s no surprise that many of the films he’s had a hand in are not good.

The author of the book series, Rick Riordan, attempted to convince the studio to change the way they were doing things and adapt its stories in a better, more thoughtful way, and even offered detailed script notes. But Rothman and the studio didn’t listen.

Reflecting on that experience now, he says, “I basically wrote off Hollywood for a long, long time. I didn’t really want to have anything to do with the movie industry. For many years I said, ‘I don’t’ want to commit. I don’t want to think about other adaptations. I finished.'”

Riordan then realized: “It was starting to become clear that something was going to happen with me or without me, I had a long conversation with Becky, my wife. We said, ‘Well, if something’s going to happen, it’s probably best to try one more time.'”

That’s when Disney came into the picture. They caught the truth and with Riordan began developing a series for Disney+. The author states that the show is “truer to the source material, which is what fans of the books would really love to see.”

To make this happen and to tell its story properly, it was revealed that Disney had budgeted for each episode Percy Jackson and the Olympians for a budget of between 12 and 15 million dollars, which is the same budget as the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian takes. This is a big deal for Disney and a big investment in a project that they believe could prove to be a huge success. The studio obviously believes that the series has great potential to attract subscribers in the coming years.

The series tells the fantastic story of the twelve-year-old modern demigod, played by Walter Scobell,” who is just coming to terms with his new supernatural powers when the sky god Zeus accuses him of stealing his master thunderbolt. With the help of his friends Grover and Annabeth, Percy must embark on the adventure of a lifetime to find him and restore order to Olympus.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians arrives on Disney+ on December 20th.