how-netflix-made-one-piece-a-smash-hit
Building the ‘One Piece’ Live-Action TV Series: How Netflix Earned Eiichiro Oda’s Blessing to Turn a Manga Treasure Into Streaming Gold
The breakout popularity of “Stranger Things” and “Wednesday” was a boon for Netflix execs, but also a lesson — both forced a scramble to line up marketing and licensing deals after launch. If the streamer’s upcoming fantasy-adventure series “One Piece” similarly turns into a phenom — as the early hype indicates — this time they’ll be ready.
Of all the titles promoted out of Netflix’s June 17 Tudum fan event, “One Piece” — the live-action TV series adaptation of the bestselling manga — was the most talked about, outpacing everything else featured at the São Paulo affair four to one, according to Netflix. “One Piece” lead actor Iñaki Godoy has seen his Instagram following spike from 28,000 to 450,000 ahead of the show’s Aug. 31 premiere.
“I think we were all stunned, truly stunned,” Netflix head of U.S. and Canada scripted series Peter Friedlander told Variety. “We knew that there was a big fan base, but to watch those actors step out onstage, you could barely hear anything. They could barely get words out, and it was really an emotional experience just watching the actors.”
Based on Eiichiro Oda’s long-running manga and anime of the same name, “One Piece” has a built-in fan base eager to see mystically stretchy, aspiring pirate king Monkey D. Luffy (newcomer Godoy) and the Straw Hat Pirates — Nami (Emily Rudd), Sanji (Taz Skylar), Zoro (Mackenyu) and Usopp (Jacob Romero) — set sail on their ship, the Going Merry, this week on Netflix. The crew is in search of the world’s greatest treasure, the elusive “one piece,” with the marines on their heels each wave of the way.
“It’s heartening to see the early reaction just to what we’ve shown,” Friedlander said. “With the teaser and trailer we’ve put out, we were trying to show the fans we’re loving on this IP, we are loving on this show and we hope you see that. I feel very hopeful and confident going into this.”
As the launch approaches, Netflix’s marketing and PR teams have begun steering this ship, stoking fan interest with 10 events worldwide — including in Los Angeles, Paris, Jakarta and Tokyo — before its premiere. And the consumer products division is at the ready with a Zara “One Piece” clothing line set to debut later in September, after the show launches. On deck is even more merch at such outlets as Hot Topic, Bandai, Hot Toys, Mexico’s Liverpool and the U.K.’s HMV.
This kind of prep is unprecedented for a first-season show — and it signals Netflix’s faith in “One Piece’s” future. That’s in spite of its last attempt at adapting popular Japanese IP into a live-action series, the John Cho-led “Cowboy Bebop.” Years in the making, the sci-fi space Western was a flop, and was canceled less than a month after its November 2021 release.
“What we learned is the fans are expecting you to be true to the source material,” says executive producer Marty Adelstein, whose Tomorrow Studios produced “Cowboy Bebop” for Netflix before embarking on “One Piece.” “As we read the comments, it was always, ‘Well, they didn’t do this character the same as this and that.’ … It really taught us a lot of what we needed to do with this one.”
The backlash to “Cowboy Bebop” also served as a warning that an adaptation of the equally beloved “One Piece” would face just as many potential critics. But with Oda and “One Piece” manga publisher Shueisha producing the project, Tomorrow Studios and Netflix had the best team possible to keep the series true to its source material.
“It became everyone’s goal to make sure that when you looked at the show, you thought this was a live-action version of the manga that just felt like another feather in the legacy of Oda,” says Becky Clements, the president of Tomorrow Studios, which landed the rights to develop “One Piece” into a live-action series in partnership with Oda and publisher Shueisha in 2017. “That people just get to see it in another genre, but still have the same reaction and feelings toward the narrative.”
Netflix picked up the series in January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world. It soon developed a “nakama” — a bonded team, as Luffy and his Straw Hats are described in “One Piece” — of U.S., Japanese and Korean Netflix executives devoted to the adaptation, according to Friedlander.
“We hadn’t done something like that before,” Friedlander says. “The logistics of that — late-night calls, early morning calls, emails — it just changes the recipe of how you would help support a show, and I think that really was a special element, a little bit of the secret sauce, because we wanted to have different perspectives on the fandom.”
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