Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Accident prone teenager, Percy discovers he's actually a demi-God, the son of Poseidon, and he is needed when Zeus' lightning is stolen. Percy must master his new found skills in order to prevent a war between the Gods that could devastate the entire world.

Critics and audiences landed in mixed territory, with reviewers finding the film's breezy mythology-hopping passable entertainment but too derivative and too joyless to fully work. The bigger story is the gap between critic indifference and fan outrage: book readers felt the adaptation stripped out what made the source material distinct, a view the author himself confirmed loudly and publicly, and one the director has since admitted was a self-inflicted wound.