The first teaser trailer for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone director Chris Columbus‘s new movie, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief has been released online, and it looks fairly interesting. The property is the first of a new possible franchise based on the five-book Percy Jackson & The Olympians series. It follows a young boy who discovers that he’s the half-human son of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon. This sets off an adventure that sees him trying to save his mother while attempting to locate the stolen lightning bolt of Zeus, and even trying to prevent a war among the gods.

The trailer is just a teaser and doesn’t show much, but what you do see is compelling. To sum it up, we see the young boy Percy Jackson (played by Logan Lerman) enters the Empire State Building in New York City and presses a mysterious Omega symbol button in the elevator. This brings him up as high as it will go before magically shooting through the top of the building in a beam of light, and bringing him to the base of Mount Olympus itself.

Click over to the other side to see the trailer and find out who’s part of the massive cast, if you do not know already.

Joining Lerman is a very impressive cast that will be fun to compare to the equally-impressive cast of Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans and its identical Greek god characters. The cast of The Lightning Thief goes as follows: Kevin McKidd (of the fantastic Rome) as Poseidon; Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) as Zeus; Steve Coogan (Tropic Thunder) as Hades; Ray Winstone (The Departed) as Ares; Uma Thurman (Kill Bill) as Medusa; Pierce Brosnan (The Matador) as Chiron; Rosario Dawson (Alexander) as Persephone; and Catherine Keener (The 40 Year Old Virgin) as the boy’s mother.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is aimed at a younger audience and the premise sounds a lot like it’s a more family-friendly version of the aforementioned Clash of the Titans. If you’re a fan of the sub-genre of this mythology, this is the perfect time to be a movie fan with the two mentioned above, as well as Tarsem Singh’s War of Gods expected to be on the way, and the currently-dormant God of War video game adaptation lurking in the dark at the moment.

Trailer

[Source: trailer courtesy of Moviefone]