Co-creator Miles Millar declared on Wednesday that Harry Potter or Percy Jackson and the Olympians did not influence the Netflix series.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Millar said that the similarities to the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson novels on Wednesday were not meant to be seen as homages to the series.
When asked if any prominent Young Adult fiction novels affected the Netflix series, the creator confessed that Wednesday’s creators were fans of the genre but added that the show mostly mirrored the works of horror author Stephen King and filmmaker Tim Burton.
“There was no homage to Percy Jackson or Harry Potter or anything like that, but the parallels are there as soon as you get to boarding school,” Millar remarked. “We debated it at first, because if we’re doing the adolescent Wednesday Addams, is it humorous if she’s the outcast in a conventional high school? But then we decided that every day should be spent with the family, and we kind of wanted her out of the family.”
The Addams Family boarding school was the second aspect of the boarding school, the designer continued. So, where did Gomez and Morticia attend school? What exactly is it? How do these people exist in reality? So that pleased us in terms of opening out and expanding the world of the Addams Family, and I believe it has piqued people’s interest.
Now we have the opportunity to really extend that universe in future seasons, and what’s fantastic is that no one has really explored this portion of the Addams Family, so it truly is a blank canvas on which we’re eager to be able to draw.”
Fans Can’t Get Adequately of Wednesday
Based on the long-running The Addams Family franchise created by animator Charles Addams, Wednesday follows the namesake daughter of the macabre family as she begins her first year at the famed boarding school for outcasts, Nevermore Academy.
Following its Nov. 23 premiere, the Netflix series soon became hugely popular, with a study from information, analytics, and market measurement firm Nielsen estimating that Wednesday hauled in approximately 6 billion minutes in views during its first week of release.