Disney+ Digs Up The Kane Chronicles, And We Have Opinions About Who Should Play The Cat (TV news).
Netflix spent the better part of four years failing to make a film out of Rick Riordan’s Egyptian-flavoured trilogy, then quietly shovelled the whole thing back into the sarcophagus in 2024. Two years on, Disney+ has strolled past the burial chamber, prised off the lid, and announced a live-action series version of The Kane Chronicles, because if there is one thing the House of Mouse understands, it is that a mummy is never really dead, it is merely between distribution deals.
The announcement landed on 3 September. Riordan co-creates with Angela Robinson, who will also write and executive produce, with 20th Television producing for Disney+. Rebecca Riordan is aboard as a non-writing executive producer, and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Jeremy Bell of The Gotham Group round out the EP credits. The official logline runs thus: 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. Which is a tidy way of saying: two teenagers blow up the British Museum and then have to deal with the paperwork.
For the three of you who have not read them, the books are The Red Pyramid, The Throne Of Fire and The Serpent’s Shadow, published between 2010 and 2012, and they follow Carter and Sadie Kane, siblings raised apart, descendants of the pharaohs, who discover that their Egyptologist father Julius has a rather ambitious plan involving the Rosetta Stone and a hand grenade’s worth of hieroglyphic bad judgement. Set gets loose. Osiris gets complicated. A baboon called Khufu eats things that end in -o and plays basketball. It is, on balance, the most purely fun thing Riordan has written, and it has spent a decade and a half being the series that everyone likes and nobody adapts.
Now, credit where it is due. Angela Robinson is not a random name plucked from the Disney rolodex. She has True Blood, The L Word and How To Get Away With Murder behind her, plus directing work on Wednesday, which means she has form in exactly the register this needs: teenagers, the supernatural, and dialogue that does not sound as though it was written by a committee of brand-safety consultants. She also made Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, which suggests she can handle a story where the mythology is the least strange thing in the room.
The caveat, and there is always a caveat, is that “in development” is not “commissioned.” Nobody has ordered a series. There is no cast, no start date, no episode count, and no filming location beyond the general assumption that a great deal of London will be recreated somewhere with a better tax break. Netflix also had this project in development, and look how that turned out. Riordan’s own track record here is instructive: he spent years publicly and cheerfully loathing the Chris Columbus film adaptations of Percy Jackson, then got the keys to the Disney+ version and produced something the fandom broadly approves of. Percy Jackson And The Olympians returns for its third season on 20 November, tackling The Titan’s Curse, and a Magnus Chase adaptation has been circling the same development airspace. The Riordanverse is quietly becoming Disney’s most functional shared universe, largely by the radical strategy of letting the author near it.
Which brings us to the parlour game. The Kane kids will, inevitably, be unknowns. Disney will find them in a school production in Croydon and a drama club in Brooklyn, and quite right too. But the grown-ups are fair game, so here is our entirely unsolicited fantasy casting, offered with the confidence of people who will not be held accountable for it.
Julius Kane, the father who detonates a priceless artefact on page forty and then spends three books being unavailable: David Oyelowo. You need someone who can sell “I have done a terrible thing for excellent reasons” in a single look, and then be dead-ish but authoritative for a season and a half. Amos Kane, the impeccably dressed uncle with the porkpie hat, the Brooklyn mansion and the jazz habit, who is also carrying rather more chaos than he lets on: Chiwetel Ejiofor, though we would take Ariyon Bakare in a heartbeat. The role needs charm, tailoring, and the capacity to turn genuinely frightening in the back half.
Set, god of chaos, red of skin and delightful of manner, the villain who is having a much better time than anyone else in the story: Paapa Essiedu. Set does not brood, he banters, and Essiedu can make a threat sound like an invitation to lunch. Bast, cat goddess, currently residing in a kitten called Muffin: Jodie Turner-Smith, who has the exact combination of elegance and imminent violence the part requires. Isis, riding around in Sadie’s head and offering unhelpful advice about power: Cynthia Erivo, obviously, and if she sings even once we will forgive the production anything. Horus, doing the same job in Carter’s skull with roughly ninety per cent more ego: Damson Idris.
Michel Desjardins, the French chief lector with the forked beard and the immovable opinions: Vincent Cassel, and we will hear no arguments. Thoth, god of knowledge, running a laboratory in Memphis, Tennessee, because of course he is: Toby Jones, playing him as a distracted academic who has not slept since the Middle Kingdom. Anubis, the god of funerals who inconveniently manifests as an extremely handsome teenager: whoever Disney’s casting department has been quietly keeping in a drawer for precisely this eventuality. Gran and Gramps Faust, the London grandparents: Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent, and if the production does not at least ask them, it has failed at a basic level.
Khufu the baboon will be a motion-capture performance, will cost more than the rest of the cast combined, and will be the single most beloved character in the show. That is not speculation, that is arithmetic.
The real question is whether Disney has the nerve to keep the books’ framing device, in which Carter and Sadie narrate the whole thing into a tape recorder, bickering, interrupting and correcting each other throughout. It is the best thing about the trilogy and the hardest thing to film, which means it will be the first casualty of the second draft. Prove us wrong, Ms Robinson. We would love to be proved wrong.
