One Piece season 2 already written, despite Netflix not yet ordering One Piece season 2
The series' producers are exhibiting a level of boundless confidence worthy of Monkey D. Luffy himself
Aux News One Piece
Good news for anyone who’s found themselves surprisingly charmed by Netflix’s live-action adaptation of long-running manga and anime series One Piece: A second season of the show might not be as far out as you might be expecting.
This is per Variety, which reports that the show’s producers, including Marty Adelstein of Tomorrow Studios, apparently got some of their work done in advance this time around: Adelstein asserts that the scripts for a second season of the series have already been written, and are just waiting for permission to shoot. Which you could understandably accuse of being a pretty severe case of putting the cart before the horse, in so far as Netflix has not, in fact, asked for a second season of the series to be made just yet. Still, y’know: Good hustle. (Tomorrow Studios president Becky Clements has claimed that Netflix has told producers that the show “exceeded expectations,” although god only knows what that means in the current “pump it up, then dump it” streaming climate.)
All of this has apparently contributed to a level of optimism from producers that would be worthy of the show’s gleefully unflappable pirate hero, Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy). Clements suggests that the series—a cartoonishly bright pirate adventure with a lot of elaborate visual effects—could be ready to roll out new episodes in as little as a year. (Give or take the conclusion of the SAG-AFTRA strike, of course.) “Somewhere between a year and 18 months, we could be ready for air,” Clements asserted.
Which, again, seems very ambitious for a show whose streamer has so far asked for zero new episodes, but Clements and Adelstein seem very confident that they’ll soon be King Of The Pirate-Based-Shows. And, to be fair, at least they’re putting their bravado in service of a genuinely fun show: One Piece might not be the most intellectual offering going in the streaming world right now, but it’s a consistently enjoyable trip, with Godoy giving a cheerfully charming performance as the lead.
4 Comments
Considering how hugely complex the world-building gets later in the manga, and how the cast of characters grows into the hundreds, I have to wonder how they’ll be able to do the story justice with eight episodes per season.
The first season was a lot of fun, but it adapted the simplest plotlines in the series, so it wasn’t difficult to streamline things. Season 2 of live action One Piece would be moving into the point where everything starts to become more connected and plotlines begin to carry over from arc to arc. There’s a lot less material that you can remove without literally losing the plot.I’m not saying this show can’t pull it off (I was pleasantly surprised with how well this show adapted things) but they will need to change their approach in later seasons to adapt for how Eiichiro Oda’s writing style evolved over time. I’m curious to see how they handle that challenge.
Also really looking forward to seeing how some of the locations are handled, as they just get wilder and more surreal as the series goes. So far we’ve only seen harbor towns, but later on there’s a cloud kingdom, an underwater city, an island made of cake…I really want to see how they pull those off in live action.
I thought this sort of thing was somewhere between frowned upon and verboten. I remember Villeneuve in particular talking about how he wasn’t going to write Dune: Part 2 until it had been greenlit, and I believe that was because he technically wasn’t allowed to write it without being paid.
I’m impressed with the show so far. I had very low expectations. If Netflix don’t commit however at this point I’m done with them. I have a hard time trusting them to finish a story.
This could be their Game of Thrones and it could easily run for 10 years. I feel like they get this fanbase’s hopes up with how the show is now and drop it or cheap out in the future and they will alienate a huge worldwide audience.
Inaki is absolutely a revelation as Luffy. I thought the anime was OK, but that dude has a commanding presence that I love.