Having apparently satisfied itself that kids and teens really aren’t going to get tired of Rick Riordan’s “basically teenage superheroes but they’re also based on classical mythological figures” wheelhouse any time soon, Disney+ has officially moved the Percy Jackson author up into the world of Potential Spin-Off Material. Specifically, Variety reports that the streamer (currently in between the second and third seasons of the well-received Percy Jackson And The Olympians) has begun development on a TV adaptation of Riordan’s The Kane Chronicles books, which take place in the same universe as his Jackson novels but which—get this—are about the descendants of Egyptian gods and royalty, instead of Greek ones.
Riordan is set to serve (with his wife Rebecca and his collaborators on the Percy Jackson show) as an executive producer on the new series, suggesting his close involvement in the franchise will continue. (The author has been vocal in the past about his unhappiness with the earlier film franchise adapting the Percy Jackson books, and has made a very strong point of being more closely tied to, and having stronger oversight over, Percy Jackson And The Olympians.) The series is being developed by veteran TV maker Angela Robinson, whose previous credits include long production and writing stints on The L Word, True Blood, and How To Get Away With Murder, but nothing in the YA lane that’s been Riordan’s bread and butter. (If Kane gets picked up by Disney+ to series, Robinson will reportedly both executive produce and co-write the series with Riordan, who’s been credited as a screenwriter on several episodes of Olympians.)
Published between 2010 and 2012, the three Kane books center on siblings Carter and Sadie Kane, modern descendants of the two pharaohs Narmer and Ramses the Great. (This gives them magic powers, naturally.) The show’s logline makes it sound like it’ll put as much focus on personal relationships as, like, ankh-based magic, though, revealing that “When their father unleashes the god of chaos and vanishes, the estranged Kane siblings must master their inherited Egyptian magic, forge unlikely alliances, and rescue their father before warring gods can wreak havoc on our modern world.”
No word on when Kane might make its way to streaming TV.
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