There’s one thing the team behind “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” wants to make abundantly clear. “Maybe you’ve heard of a movie with a similar title,” the show’s Twitter account warns. “We’re not that.”

It is not “The Lightning Thief,” the 2010 film that Rotten Tomatoes granted a mediocre 49 percent — or the sequel that scored even lower. The film that The New York Times called “flat and mechanical” with a title character who was “blandly appealing.” The film that plunged Rick Riordan into despair.

“If I were intentionally trying to sabotage this project,” Mr. Riordan wrote, “I doubt I could have done a better job than this script.” He would know. He wrote the best-selling Percy Jackson series on which the film was (loosely) based.

So when the musical — now in previews for an Oct. 16 opening at the Longacre Theater — started coming together several years later, the actors and creative team got the message. They read the books. They reread the books. When faced with a question of what would happen next, who would say what, how to make something happen onstage — they went back to the books.