Percy Jackson Season 3 Debuts First Footage at Lucca Comics

Disney+'s "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" showed previously unseen Season 3 footage at Italy's Lucca Comics and Games Festival on Friday, with stars Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri joining co-creator and executive producer Jonathan E. Steinberg and executive producer Dan Shotz for a dedicated panel at the Teatro Moderno movie theatre.

The clips drew loud reactions from the assembled fans. In one, Percy Jackson declares "Zeus sucks!" — a line that produced a roar from the crowd. In another, the audience screamed when a soaked Scobell appeared on screen, a sign of how much the show and its cast have matured in the four years since the series debuted.

Season 3 adapts "The Titan's Curse," the third book in Rick Riordan's bestselling series. It follows Percy (Scobell), Grover Underwood (Simhadri) and Annabeth Chase (Jeffries), plus their fellow campers at Camp Half-Blood, as they battle the Titan Atlas, played by Holt McCallany.

Who's joining the cast?

The new season introduces several Greek gods and returning characters:

• Charlie Bushnell returns as Luke Castellan
• Daniel Diemer plays Tyson
• Dior Goodjohn plays Clarisse La Rue
• Hubert Smielecki joins as Apollo
• Kate McKinnon voices Aphrodite
• Ming-Na Wen plays Hera

What's the story about?

In the first clip shown at Lucca, Thalia (Tamara Smart) fights a monster in an underground carpark — a sequence with hints of the 1980s fantasy classic "Highlander" — before Percy and Annabeth arrive to help her and try to recruit her for a mission to save two half-bloods (the show's term for demigods) from a military academy.

The stakes escalate this season. "Season 3 is really, really big," Steinberg said. "I think the story that we've been hinting at for two seasons about the bigger war is now starting to become real. And we're going to meet our first real bad guy."

Shotz pointed to the season's scale. "The scope is incredible. Bigger monsters. We've got titans. We've got gods. And this season, we've got all the Gods. So you're going to get to meet all of your favorite characters, but really, it starts with this incredible cast."

How is the cast handling the mythology off screen?

The young actors say the series has started bleeding into their everyday lives. "All the things that we do in the show are based on Greek mythology. And when you hear it outside of filming, you kind of get this weird feeling," Scobell said.

He described a recent moment at school: "I remember the other day, I was in class and I was not really paying attention. And someone said something about the minotaur, and I lifted my head up and freaked out for a second."

Simhadri noted that his character Grover faces his own tension between the real and mythological worlds. "Grover can't always really talk about his personal quest with Annabeth and Percy. I don't think they understand the value of the natural world or Pan as much as he does," he said. The new storyline with the hunters led by Artemis gives Grover a breakthrough: "It's such a nice change of pace for him to get to be able to find a kindred soul and be able to talk about the things that he cares about with someone who understands it as well as he does."

What changes for Annabeth?

Jeffries said the show has expanded Annabeth beyond the relatively small role she plays in the novel, and made her more assertive. "This season, she's very much more independent since she has to rely on herself. You can see how much she really only thinks about survival," Jeffries said. "And you will see her strategy about everything that's going on around her is not to convince the other person, or to save their life. It's to help herself."

She summed it up bluntly: "This might sound weird, but it's a smart manipulation, basically."

For fans counting down, the wait is short: "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" Season 3 premieres Nov. 20 on Disney+, with a full pantheon of gods and the series' first true villain waiting in the wings.