A live-action One Piece adaptation is coming to Netflix care of Tomorrow Studios and Shueisha. The series will be ten episodes, though it hasn’t been announced which parts (if any) of the anime it will cover. It’s also entirely possible this will be an original story featuring Luffy and crew instead of an adaptation of existing material.
Deadline reports that Steven Maeda, who previously wrote on The X-Files, Lost, and CSI: Miami, is the showrunner for the live-action One Piece, and he will also serve as writer and executive producer alongside Matt Owens. Becky Clements and Marty Adelstein of Tomorrow Studios, who also worked on Snowpiercer and Hanna as well as the in-production Cowboy Bebop live-action series, will also be executive producers on the project.
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Fortunately, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda will also serve as executive producer on Netflix’s One Piece, and will surely offer creative input for the series. Given the almost universal disdain for Netflix’s Death Note, we can only hope that Oda’s presence will focus the project into something fans want instead of just going for the broadest appeal and failing.
One Piece has been running since 1997 and spans 964 chapters over 95 volumes. Needless to say, it’s a bit intimidating (and expensive) for someone who’s looking to get into it for the first time. Perhaps the live-action series will make for an excellent introduction to the rest of the One Piece universe. I, for one, have no clue what’s going on in the series, so I could use something like that myself.
There’s no news yet as to what the release date of Netflix’s One Piece live-action series will be. You would assume the Cowboy Bebop live-action series would premiere first. However, production has been delayed due to John Cho’s knee injury. So, we’ll just have to hold tight for more news on when we’ll be able to watch Netflix’s live-action anime adaptations. Regardless of what they end up doing, they definitely need to use the 4Kids One Piece dub intro song.
