Percy Jackson and the Olympians concludes its 8-episode second season on Disney+ tomorrow. And now, the show’s composer is revealing that he took inspiration from one of the most legendary names in movie music: John Williams.
Bear McCreary, who’s also scored major series like Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D along with video games God of War, Forspoken, and Call of Duty, Vanguard, says his work on Percy Jackson follows in the footsteps of the “big and orchestral” music created by Williams.
I spoke with McCreary about his work on Percy Jackson and the Olympians and asked if he was trying to innovate when creating music for the series.
“Innovative is not what I was going for,” McCreary says. “I’m writing in this sort of traditional John Williams kind of style. John Williams wrote Star Wars when he was 44 and he was not trying to innovate. He was trying to reference what he grew up with. So he wanted to share with the world the music that he and George Lucas loved when they were kids. It was big orchestral thematic music. That was 50 years ago.”
“When I am writing music that is big and orchestral, I’m writing the music of my childhood so that kids who are tuning into Percy Jackson at age between 5 and 10 who don’t know Indiana Jones musically – they aren’t as familiar with these sounds as we are. And so I realized enough time has passed [and] I would love to share with kids today how much I love the music I grew up on, as John Williams shared with kids in the ’70s how much he loved the music he grew up on. So oddly, innovation was the last thing on my mind.”
McCreary, who also composes the score for the Prime Video series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, says that writing themes for Percy Jackson was not quite as difficult as creating music for Middle-earth.
“There was a lot of ideating [with Percy Jackson],” McCreary says. “Not as much in comparison to Rings of Power simply because of the scale of the show. In the case of Percy, I had to write fewer themes out of the gate, but that doesn’t mean there was less pressure on each theme to carry its weight. And the big question was whether it should sound like Greek instruments, because these are gods known from Greek mythology. I’m glad I had time to play with that.”
McCreary says that even though the music from Percy Jackson and the Olympians has roots in epic cinema, he still wanted to make sure the show’s themes resonated with modern audiences.
“We were very much telling a modern story about modern kids,” McCreary says. “And there’s a lot of modern sounds. But fundamentally, it’s a very thematic, old school score. And I would say the trifecta of the three main character themes – Percy, Grover, and Annabeth – are all delightful in a way. Percy is this classical hero theme. Grover is the classic comedic sidekick character theme, and Annabeth is like this ‘lyrical potential love interest down the line’ theme. It’s delightful for me to get to play around with those tropes.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians is streaming on Disney+.
Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He’s spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton
