It’s all well and good dreaming big when your TV show debuts to immense global success and then somehow manages to get even more popular in its second week, but the masterminds behind One Piece should be wary of getting a little too carried away.
Of course, the anime adaptation is already on course to be renewed for a second season, but that doesn’t mean it’s been guaranteed immunity for as long as it wants to run. The streaming service’s roster of originals to have even gone beyond four runs is mighty slim, but the executive producers are nonetheless confident they can eke it out for at least six.
Speaking to Deadline, Tomorrow Studios’ Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements touted their grand ongoing vision for One Piece, which is a risky gambit given Netflix’s reputation for rarely allowing any of its exclusives to even sniff the air around a sixth season.
“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. Everything we do is in concert with Netflix, Shueisha and Oda-san, they are a part of that conversation.
We’ve definitely had more thorough conversations about what we would do with Season 2 should we have the opportunity, and then less extensive conversations about where we would go for season three to six. The one thing I would say, we’re all unified in the parts of the manga that you just absolutely cannot eliminate, and that’s our guiding principle, the stories that we know and the characters that we know are important to the fans. So that really is the start in breaking future seasons. It will require a lot of conversations, but we feel lucky to have have the roadmap.”
Hubris has been the downfall of many once-mighty shows that got ideas well beyond their station, so maybe it’s best if we all take One Piece a single season at a time before casting our eyes way too far into the future.