Netflix's live-action adaptation of One Piece has been a smash hit. The first season sits at an impressive 85% on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score even higher at 95%.
One of the rare successful adaptations of a manga, One Piece has already been greenlit for a second season. With over 1,000 episodes in the original manga, there's no shortage of material for season two and possibly beyond; however, the showrunners face an interesting problem — one similar to problems faced when filming the legendary Harry Potter films.
Speaking to The Direct, Hirsch Whitaker, who served as Director of Cinematography on the first two episodes of Season 1, warned that time is one of the biggest obstacles facing the Netflix adaptation.
"[For] Season 2, there's just, there's so much material to be made based on the show. It's gonna be like 'Harry Potter' though, they're gonna have to do it fast before everybody gets too old," Whitaker said.
One Piece focuses on the pirate adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew as they search for the hidden treasure of the PIrate King Gol D. Roger. The ages of each character vary in the manga, but most range between their late teens and early 20s. Luff, for example, is 17 years old when the manga begins. Zoro is 19 and Nami is 18.
Their real-life counterparts are already much older. While Iñaki Godoy (Luffy) is just 20 years old, Emily Rudd (Nami) is 30 years old, while Mackenyu (Zoro) is 26 years old. So already the cast is older than their manga counterparts, making the race against time even more important.
Now the One Piece manga does have a timeskip about halfway through, but even then the characters age only two years. It could buy the showrunners for the Netflix series a bit of time, but it will still be imperative that they write and film as quickly as possible.
Another thing working in its favor is the fact that the characters don't start off quite as young as the ones in Harry Potter or Stranger Things, two other franchises that ran into aging issues with their cast. Aging isn't quite as noticeable from your early to late 20s as it is from a young kid to a teenager and young adult.
Still, with over 1,000 episodes of the manga to hopefully adopt, it will always be a race against time for the showrunners. The live-action One Piece series was announced in January 2020 with its 8-episode premiere season released on August 31, 2023. Season 2 doesn't yet have a premiere date but hopefully, it comes much sooner — especially as production has already started.