Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s best-selling manga “One Piece” has been a hit, currently enjoying the No. 1 in Netflix’s Top 10 for a second week and dominating international charts.
However, there’s no word on a second season renewal as yet with Netflix likely taking its time to fully analyse the data. Production isn’t cheap. The first season was shot over about 6-7 months followed by another 5-6 months of post-production and is believed to have cost around $18 million per episode.
So there’s questions of availability with the core cast like Inaki Godoy, Emily Rudd, Taz Skylar, Jacob Gibson and Mackenyu Arata. There’s also weather factors, such as filming locations in South Africa, and only certain times of year that are best for production.
In an interview with Deadline, executive producers Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements spoke about the show’s chances for renewals and they hope to stick with it as long as possible:
Adelstein: “We have hopes for 12 seasons, there’s so much material”
Clements: “We’re over 1,080 chapters at this point in the manga… We have plans with Matt Owens for how we would break multiple seasons, and I think even if we did six seasons, we would probably only use up half of the chapters of the manga. It really could go on and on and on.”
Asked if they have at least six seasons in them, Clements laughs and says: “Oh yeah, easy”. She adds everything they do is in agreement with Netflix, publisher Shueisha and creator Oda-san. More importantly there are specific story arcs, characters and more which they’re all in lockstep on in terms of adapting:
“We’ve definitely had more thorough conversations about what we would do with Season 2 should we have the opportunity, and then less extensive conversations about where we would go for season three to six.
The one thing I would say, we’re all unified in the parts of the manga that you just absolutely cannot eliminate, and that’s our guiding principle, the stories that we know and the characters that we know are important to the fans. So that really is the start in breaking future seasons. It will require a lot of conversations, but we feel lucky to have the roadmap.
The manga consists of 11 sagas with each saga consisting of around 4-8 story arcs. The first season’s eight episodes adapted Chapters 1-95 of the manga which is almost the entire 100-chapter East Blue saga.
A second season would adapt the remaining five-chapter “Loguetown” arc of the East Blue saga and then move on to the Arabasta saga. How much of that it will get through isn’t clear.
