“One Piece” Twelve Season Talk Resurfaces

Back in 2023 when the first season of Netflix’s live-action “One Piece” series premiered, executive producer Marty Adelstein told Deadline: “We have hopes for 12 seasons, there’s so much material.”

Fellow EP Becky Clements added: “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.”

With the recent release of the show’s second season, that quote resurfaced and spread like wildfire over the weekend stirring debates about if such a plan is remotely feasible considering the budget and time required along with other logistical issues such as the cast aging or moving on to other roles.

As Forbes points out, Netflix is facing an interesting dilemma: “What do you do with a show that critics and audiences love, but costs a ton, but has big viewership, but not crazy big, but with plans for triple or 6x the number of seasons it has now to ‘finish’ its story.”

It’s doubly surprising these comments have resurfaced considering actor Mackenyu, who plays Roronoa Zoro, revealed the other week that franchise creator Eiichiro Oda has an end in mind for the live-action series – an arc he wants the story to reach which many suspect would be the manga/anime’s halfway point and involves a major time skip.

After a two-and-a-half year time gap, the second season arrived to decidedly better reviews and saw a viewership drop of just 9% compared to the first season – one of the smallest drops of a Netflix original. However the show didn’t make it #1 in the US top 10 list, even as it topped the list globally and in most individual countries. It’s one of the biggest hits for the streamer, but it’s not a “Stranger Things” or “Squid Game”-sized juggernaut.

A third season is already several months into filming and thus should be out much quicker with a mid-late 2027 looking likely, nearly halving the gap between first and second season runs.

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