Percy Jackson Season 3 Panel: Titan's Curse First Look at San Diego Comic-Con

Percy Jackson and the Olympians returned to San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H in advance of the Season 3 premiere, which is now confirmed to kick off on November 20th. The excitement started when Leah Sava Jeffries, appearing via a video message from the set of The Cheetah Girls: Next Gen, introduced the first three minutes of the first-ever screen adaptation of The Titan's Curse.

Season 3 opens in a parking garage, where Thalia Grace is squaring off with a monster to get answers about Luke's whereabouts, unaware that Percy and Annabeth have tracked her down. Percy makes an entrance by bursting a water pipe and using it as a distraction so he can finish the monster off with Riptide. Annabeth then steps in to recruit Thalia, buttering her up as “the most powerful demigod on Earth,” but the alliance is dead on arrival. Percy was on board until he heard Thalia ask after Luke, and the clip ends with him backing out on the spot.

Executive producer Dan Shotz described Season 3 as “more intense, more mature” than what's come before, with EP Craig Silverstein adding that the writers leaned harder on humor precisely because the villains and stakes are getting scarier. Both were candid about the pressure of the material. Silverstein also shared that when author Rick Riordan first saw concept art of Westover Hall, he said, “That's exactly how I imagined it.”

In the book, Annabeth spends most of Titan's Curse absent from the main action; the show is using that gap to build out her own storyline in parallel rather than sideline her. Silverstein framed it as staying faithful to the saga overall while using the extra real estate of a multi-season adaptation to explore corners Riordan didn't have room for, Annabeth's arc chief among them this season.

Thalia's arc got similar attention. Tamara Smart, promoted from recurring guest star to series regular after Season 2's reveal of Thalia's true parentage, said she researched written accounts from people who'd experienced near-death states to inform how Thalia processes coming back to a world that moved on without her. That trauma with her father Zeus doesn't resolve; Smart said Season 3 digs further into it, and into the “generational beef” forming between Thalia, Percy, and Luke as she reenters their lives.

Luke, meanwhile, is being pushed toward his lowest point yet. Charlie Bushnell said his character is “as deep in the darkness as we've ever seen him,” having failed to secure the Golden Fleece and lost the Battle of Half-Blood Hill at the end of Season 2, failures Kronos has clearly made him pay for. Bushnell described the season picking up with Luke trying to make amends, visibly worn down by the toll of it. 

Walker Scobell, for his part, said playing Percy this season meant thinking less about performing the character and more about instinctively knowing how to serve the story, the version of ease that comes after three seasons and roughly five years in the role.

Two new faces joined the panel: Olive Abercrombie and Levi Chrisopulos, cast as Bianca and Nico di Angelo, whose casting was announced at last year's panel and who were making their Comic-Con debut. Both described walking onto the Camp Half-Blood set for the first time as disorienting in the best way, with newly built cabins and details like hidden carvings and Easter eggs. Chrisopulos said the veteran cast's advice boiled down to “just be yourself,” which didn't stop him from correcting Scobell's line reading in their first scene together, unprompted, on the first take.

Without spoiling plot, the cast and EPs pointed to several sequences as highlights to watch for: the extraction at Westover Hall, the military school where Grover first finds Nico and Bianca; a Hoover Dam set piece Aryan Simhadri called “pretty damn good”; and what nearly everyone at the table — Silverstein, Abercrombie, and Chrisopulos among them — flagged unprompted as a standout, the Junkyard of the Gods. Shotz teased the long-awaited arrival of the Hunters of Artemis, including Zoë Nightshade, and said the costume and makeup work on them took considerable effort to get right. A separate audience question confirmed Hercules has been cast for the show, though the producers wouldn't confirm who — only that, contrary to that fan's hope, it isn't Kevin Sorbo.

The panel closed with a first look at Atlas, teased through a brief voiceover — “It was my choice to hold the weight, the Titan's curse. I knew the risk, but if I needed to sacrifice myself to save the world, to save my friends, was it really a choice?” — tying the footage directly back to the season's title and stakes.

As with past panels, there was plenty of behind-the-scenes texture: Simhadri revealed he gets nosebleeds when he's especially locked into a scene, and once moonlighted as an emergency seamster for the costume department after a button popped off Jason Mantzoukas’s Hawaiian shirt. Cast members repeatedly described the group as a family that picks back up instantly between seasons, something Shotz said has only deepened with Abercrombie and Chrisopulos experiencing camp and Westover for the first time alongside them.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 3 premieres on Disney+ on November 20th.