Skip to main content

The Adam Project’s Walker Scobell will star in Percy Jackson

Walker Scobell made his feature film debut earlier this year opposite Ryan Reynolds in Netflix’s The Adam Project. Now, the young actor is stepping into his own franchise. Via Variety, Disney+ has cast Scobell as Percy Jackson, the leading character in the upcoming Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

At 13 years old, Scobell is considerably younger than Logan Lerman, the actor who portrayed Percy Jackson in two previous live-action films. However, Scobell’s age is closer to Percy’s age in the first novel by Rick Riordan. As introduced in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Percy was a seemingly normal 12-year-old boy who struggled with dyslexia and ADHD. But Percy soon learned that he was a demi-god and the son of Poseidon after Zeus accused him of stealing his master lightning bolt. To prevent a war among the gods, Percy and his fellow demi-gods took it upon themselves to find the real thief.

Walker Scobell in The Adam Project.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Scobell is currently filming Secret Headquarters, which follows a kid who comes to suspect that his estranged father is a superhero after discovering a hidden lair in his home. Beyond that, Scobell doesn’t have anything else on the horizon beyond Percy Jackson. But this will probably be the beginning of a very promising career in Hollywood.

Unlike the Percy Jackson feature films, Riordan and his wife, Rebecca Riordan, will both be executive producers on the new Disney+ series. Rick Riordan is also co-writing the pilot episode with Jon Steinberg. The Muppets director James Bobin will helm the pilot episode, which will film this summer.

Disney+ hasn’t set a date for Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but a 2023 debut seems likely.

Editors' Recommendations

Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…
With The Adam Project, Shawn Levy steps into the spotlight
Shawn Levy directing Ryan Reynolds on the set of The Adam Project

A few years ago, Shawn Levy would not have been a recognizable name to most moviegoers, but that's not necessarily the case anymore. Coming off one of his biggest successes to date with 2021's Free Guy, Levy has returned with The Adam Project, another family-friendly, crowd-pleasing genre flick in the same vein as several of his previous films.

On Netflix, The Adam Project successfully captured the streaming service’s No. 1 spot in its opening weekend, and it currently boasts a sturdy 79% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. All signs suggest that The Adam Project is yet another winning directorial outing for Levy, a director and producer whose filmography is becoming steadily more prolific and impressive with every passing year.

Read more
Beyond The Adam Project: 5 great time travel movies to watch
Split image of X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Adam Project, & Mr. Peabody & Sherman.

One of Netflix’s biggest movies of the year has finally arrived in the form of The Adam Project. Starring Ryan Reynolds as a time-traveling man who is forced to work with his younger self and his father to try and save the future, the Netflix original film is a loving homage to the sci-fi blockbusters of the 1980s and should offer enough action, humor, and heart to satisfy any genre lovers who decide to check it out.

Odds are, The Adam Project will also put its viewers in the mood to seek out other sci-fi flicks like it. Fortunately, we’ve put together a list of five great time travel movies that offer many of the same sci-fi pleasures as The Adam Project, all of which just so happen to be available to stream right now.
Flight of the Navigator (1986)

Read more
The Adam Project review: A mixed bag of saccharine sci-fi
Walker Scobell and Ryan Reynolds look at each other in a scene from The Adam Project.

Sometimes a film can have all the right ingredients -- a great cast, a talented writer, a fantastic director -- and still fall short. The Netflix film The Adam Project is the latest to fit that unfortunate mold, and it really is a shame, because it's the sort of movie you really do want to like. Sadly, it makes it frustratingly difficult to do so.

Directed by the Free Guy and Night at the Museum franchise director Shawn Levy, The Adam Project casts Ryan Reynolds as Adam Reed, a fighter pilot from the future who travels back to 2022 in order to avert a terrible, looming disaster on the horizon. Now stuck in the past, he reluctantly teams up with his 12-year-old self, played by Walker Scobell, in order to save the future.

Read more