Netflix will make One Piece “like Harry Potter” before the cast gets too old

The first season of One Piece on Netflix did the impossible: adapt Eiichiro Oda’s sweeping pirate manga into live-action without seeming ridiculous or cringey. Now that we’ve met the Straw Hat Pirates, fans are eagerly looking forward to season 2, where they’ll travel to the Grand Line and encounter all kinds of dangerous new characters.

And they could be at this for a while. Oda has been publishing his manga for over 25 years; it’s collected in a total of 106 volumes and it’s not quite done. Meanwhile, the anime has been running since 1999 and produced over 1,000 episodes to date. So far as I can tell, the first season of the Netflix show covered roughly the first 50.

So does that mean that Netflix’s One Piece will run for over 10 seasons? Young stars like Iñaki Godoy (Monkey D. Luffy), Emily Rudd (Nami) and Mackenyu (Zoro) will be getting on by then, likely too old to play characters who are supposed to be fresh-faced youngsters going off on an adventure. It’s true that Oda’s story contains a two-time time jump, but that comes over halfway through, so we won’t be there for some years.

Netflix needs to make more episodes of One Piece “fast before [the cast] gets too old”

Based on what cinematographer Nicole Hirsch Whitaker told The Direct, it sounds like the One Piece team has this issue in mind. “[For] Season 2, there’s just, there’s so much material to be made based on the show,” she said. It’s gonna be like Harry Potter though, they’re gonna have to do it fast before everybody gets too old.”

The Harry Potter movies were released over a period of 10 years between 2001 and 2011. In that time, we saw stars like Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson grow from kids into young adults. The cast of One Piece are a bit older to start, so the change won’t be as extreme, but Luffy’s boundless exuberance will probably read a bit differently when Iñaki Godoy is in his 30s vs his early 20s.

Happily, now that the Hollywood writers strike is over, the team can at least get moving on writing the second season, which apparently had started even before Netflix officially renewed the series. “Well, they definitely started writing and then the strike happened,” Whitaker said.

On the challenge of adapting One Piece to live-action

So the One Piece team has a challenge ahead of them, but based on their work on season 1, they just might be able to pull it off. “It was a real challenge,” Whitaker said. “My director, Marc [Jobst] and I talked a lot about how we would incorporate the manga and anime into the live-action version, taking it from 2D to 3D, bringing the color to life, the energy to life. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. And we were really lucky because we had about a year of prep before we started. We had a lot of time to talk about things and bounce ideas off of each other. And I’m really happy with how it all came together with everybody involved. Obviously, it wasn’t just us.”

"I was so excited when I saw Rotten Tomatoes. 95%. I mean, that’s huge. It’s even higher than Star Wars. It’s amazing. I was really excited."

That may depend on which Star Wars project you’re talking about, but the point stands: One Piece is a hit. Hopefully, we’ll be seeing season 2 in early 2025 at the very latest.

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