One Piece season 2 is already written, but Netflix hasn’t ordered it

The debut season of One Piece — a live-action remake of the phenomenally popular manga and anime by Eiichiro Oda — dropped on Netflix the other week, and it was better than any of us had hoped. That’s mostly because our expectations were at rock bottom following a string of disappointing live-action anime adaptations at Netflix, including Death Note and Cowboy Bebop. But hey, there was nowhere to go but up, and One Piece soared pretty high.

The series has done well — its was number one for at least a few days and remains in the top five most watch TV series on the streamer now — but we haven’t heard anything about a renewal. “[I]]n our subsequent calls post-launch, we have been told that we have exceeded expectations, which is also fantastic,” Tomorrow Studios president Becky Clements told Variety. CEO Marty Adelstein expects to hear something “in the next week to two weeks.”

And if that something is a renewal order, the team at Tomorrow Studios is ready. “We’ve got scripts ready,” Adelstein said. And Clements thinks new episodes could be ready “[s]omewhere between a year and 18 months, we could be ready for air.”

That seems pretty ambitious, both because One Piece is a very expensive and elaborate show to make and because Hollywood actors and writers are both currently on strike, and you can’t make the show without the excellent cast. So there are a few hurdles in the way, but I hope the show overcomes them because I’d love to see more.

Is Eiichiro Oda disappointed in Netflix’s One Piece adaptation?

While we wait for official news of One Piece’s fate, the fandom is entertaining itself with some rumors. For instance, a Twitter user named Sandman known for translating interviews with One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda recently posted this:

So this is a quote from Oda talking about the importance of Netflix’s show staying faithful to his source material. It doesn’t look to me like he’s condemning the show for failing to do that, or praising it for being especially faithful; without more context, we don’t know what exactly he means. However, multiple news outlets — I’m not linking them, they know who they are — have looked at this quote and taken it as proof that Oda is “disappointed” with the Netflix adaptation of his work.

These seems to me to be (probably willful) misreadings of Sandman’s tweet. I don’t see how you could take this as proof of Oda being disappointed in anything, particularly since he helped make the Netflix show and gave it his stamp of approval. Heaven knows I’m not above clickbait, but I think the news reports on Oda’s disappointment can be safely dismissed as such.

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