Netflix’s One Piece series has taken the hearts of anime fans and straw hat newbies alike by storm. mine too. The pirate fantasy series faithfully follows the vision of Eiichiro Oda’s manga and creates a lovingly crafted world full of exciting characters. After countless disappointing live-action adaptations, One Piece is already a milestone.
As good as the One Piece adaptation is, a dark shadow can be seen on the horizon above the Grandline. Despite all the successes, the failure of the Netflix series cannot be stopped. Because there is a big problem.
The basic problem of One Piece: The template is never completely filmed
Created by Eiichiro Oda, the manga One Piece has been running since 1997. And after 25 years, the story of the Straw Hat Pirates is still not over. Although the template is slowly sailing towards its end, since the beginning of the story well over 1000 manga chapters and over 1000 anime episodes accumulated.
Netflix
Will Luffy ever find the One Piece?
The Netflix adaptation faces an impossible task. The template is bottomless and simple too big to ever be fully filmed in live-action. To do justice to the original, Netflix’s One Piece series would need to run for at least 11 seasons.
How I up 11 seasons of One Piece come? Here is my calculation example:
One Piece needs at least 11 seasons: no Netflix series can do that
If you haven’t had any points of contact with the One Piece anime and manga before: In the template, the epic pirate story of the Straw Hats is divided into so-called sagas. These are larger story arcs within the overall plot, which in turn are broken down into smaller arcs.
The first season of Netflix’s One Piece adapted the Eastblue saga. This spans the first 100 chapters of the manga template and the first 53 episodes of the anime series. The story sagas are a good starting point for estimating how long the Netflix series really needs to tell the entire story of Luffy and Co. to the end.
In the video, Yves tells you why the One Piece adaptation was so successful:
BETTER THAN EXPECTED! ONE PIECE ON NETFLIX Review
When the One Piece film adaptation one saga per season implements, a breakdown of the following 10 manga story arcs could look something like this:
No comparably expensive blockbuster series still has 11 seasons these days – certainly none on Netflix. It is more than unlikely that the series will run that long. The alternative would be that the adaptation skips certain sagas or summarizes them in a greatly abbreviated form. In view of the passionate One Piece fan base, this is an absolute no-go.
Even minor omitted stories, moments or characters in season 1 pushed some fans of the template angry. Since these are only minor changes, this was to get over in the overall context of the season. But cutting out entire parts of the plot? That wouldn’t be the One Piece we fell in love with anymore.
20 years of One Piece? The Netflix cast will soon become a problem
If the Netflix series is actually so successful that it takes on the mammoth task of adapting all the One Piece sagas, we’re faced with the next problem. The production of such an elaborate blockbuster series usually takes almost two years per season. So theoretically it would 20 more years to go before the live-action series gets there.
Netflix
The biggest challenge facing the One Piece cast: aging
In the entire course of action of the manga, the first almost 600 chapters don’t even take half a year. For a series that releases a new season every one to two years, this temporal density is impossible to film. The problem: The The main cast of the Netflix adaptation would all be in their 40s by the end of the series. The models you drew are only about 20 years old in the template.
A specific example? Sanji actor Taz Skylar would be 47 years old after 11 seasons. Then no one will buy the 20-year-old boy pirate from him anymore. At 30, Emily Rudd, who plays navigator Nami in the One Piece series, is currently the “oldest” member of the Straw Hat cast. So it doesn’t take long for the Netflix series to reach its limits with the cast’s age.
No matter how successful One Piece may be, failure is inevitable
In the Netflix series, I fell in love with the live-action Straw Hats, sailed with them on the Flying Lamb towards the Grandline full of anticipation, and am now ready for the grand epic adventure of Season 2. And nothing would be worse than never reaching their destination and would find the fabled One Piece.
In the podcast we talk about One Piece with the German Luffy voice:
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There’s too much to suggest that the Netflix series will eventually get to the point where it’s bound to fail. The only way to bring the pirate adventure to a satisfactory conclusion is drastic changes.
Be it radical cuts, possible recasts, or a complete change in story direction, each option is the opposite of what fans are hailing the live-action series for in Season 1.
The sad truth is: One Piece will eventually have to take a different direction to escape the live-action problems. Perhaps we fans have to accept the inevitability that the original and the adaptation will one day drift apart. And we still have the manga for the full One Piece experience.