Hold on to your straw hats for this piece of news!
According to a piece that hit the entertainment news website Dateline recently, Netflix is working together with Eiichiro Oda and Tomorrow Studios (whom you might remember as the producers behind another adaptation we’ve still yet to see, Cowboy Bebop) to create a ten-episode live-action One Piece adaptation!
We have absolutely zero clues regarding a timetable for release or who will play the part of Monkey D. Luffy. We do know that Steven Maeda and Matt Owens will write the scripts and Oda himself will serve as one of the executive producers, which gives me a little more confidence in this venture.
I’m willing to bet that most of you reading this are already at least vaguely familiar with One Piece. For those of you sitting in the back of the room who have never heard of this series before, let’s quickly recap.
One Piece is one of the most popular and best-selling manga in history, with over 460 million copies in print. Launched in Weekly Shonen Jump in July 1997, it has since published almost 100 volumes and holds the world record for “the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author” which was awarded to Oda in 2015.
In the west, the manga is published by Viz Media, who describes the story as:
As a child, Monkey D. Luffy was inspired to become a pirate by listening to the tales of the buccaneer “Red-Haired” Shanks. But his life changed when Luffy accidentally ate the Gum-Gum Devil Fruit and gained the power to stretch like rubber...at the cost of never being able to swim again! Years later, still vowing to become the king of the pirates, Luffy sets out on his adventure...one guy alone in a rowboat, in search of the legendary “One Piece,” said to be the greatest treasure in the world…
An anime adaptation has been produced by Toei Animation since 1999 and thus far has aired over 900 episodes and fourteen movies in Japan.
