Anime and Manga fans rejoice! (Or not!) A One Piece live-action series has been confirmed by Netflix.
The live-action version of One Piece will apparently be 10 episodes long and will be made by Shueisha, One Piece’s publisher alongside Tomorrow Studios. The upcoming live-action iteration of Cowboy Bebop is also being produced by Tomorrow Studios.
The people confirmed to be part of production so far are Steven Maeda who will serve as showrunner, executive producer, and writer who has worked on shows like Lost and The X-Files, and Matt Owens who comes on board as an executive producer and writer, and who has worked on shows like Luke Cage and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Tomorrow Studios’ Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements who are also working on the Cowboy Bebop live-action are also on board as executive producers. One Piece author Eiichiro Oda is also part of the project as executive producer.
The One Piece live-action series will be co-produced by Tomorrow Studios and Netflix and will be a partnership of ITV Studios and Adelstein. The streaming giant will also be responsible for the physical production of the show.
There has been a lot of backlash from live-action renditions of Japanese Anime for the longest time because nobody outside of Japan has done it correctly yet. Something similar happened with Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Air Bender over a decade ago after the infamous live-action of Dragon Ball was premiered. On the other hand, Japan has done an amazing job with their live-action renditions notably with the Rurouni Kenshin series.
One Piece brings you to a fantastical world of pirates with extraordinary abilities as you follow the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, known as “straw-hat Luffy”, the captain of the Strawhat Pirates. His dream is to become the Pirate King one day and to discover where the legendary treasure left by the legendary pirate king Gol D. Roger is located.
Eiichiro Oda’s series first started back in 1997 when it was serialized in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in Japan. One Piece’s manga has is nearing 500 million copies sold worldwide and has made history back in 2015 when it obtained the Guinness World Record for a comic book having the most copies published and sold from the same author.
One Piece is among the longest-running anime TV series alongside the likes of Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, and Bleach, and is still ongoing with 919 episodes and still counting.