Anime adaptations are bad way more often than they’re good, so the Netflix live-actionOne Pieceis already on thin ice with the source material’s fanbase. To make matters worse, the company’s latest big swing at the genre went very wrong, and the two shows share some important similarities.
A live-action adaptation ofOne Piecehas been a going concern for years, which is to be expected for one of the most beloved ongoing media franchises in modern history. The series, written by Eiichiro Oda, has outlasted most of its competition and remained popular for over twenty years,recently celebrating the series' 1000th chapter.
RELATED:Cowboy Bebop Review
Netflix’sCowboy Bebopis a disaster in every conceivable way. Though it has its defenders, the ten-episode season abandons everything special about its source material in favor of a generic mess. Most of the performers seem bored, the action looks terrible, and the writing is somehow simultaneously immature and overwrought. Every aspect of the show carries the feeling of someone who vaguely remembers the original anime attempting to recap it for someone they believe is really stupid.
Fans hated it because it ruined their favorite series anddrained all the life from their favorite character. Newcomers weren’t much kinder, the show’s almost insulting pandering fell completely flat on any audience familiar with the basic elements of storytelling. Netflix’sCowboy Bebopmay have had its merits, but whatever it did succeed at is now comfortably lost forever. Twenty days after the season’s release,Netflix announced the series' cancellation, dooming it to end on a cliffhanger so bad, it went viral as one final devastating insult.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the scuttling ofCowboy Bebop, and there are several, it probably won’t be learned by Netflix. This is far from their first dreadful live-action anime adaptation and it’s unfortunately unlikely to be their last. DespiteBebop’smany trespasses,Netflix’s take onDeath Noteis still a comfortably worse piece of filmmaking for many of the same reasons. If that disaster didn’t sour the company on the genre, this won’t move the needle at all. The handful of decent anime adaptations provide some slight ray of hope to those fans who dread announcements of their favorite series getting the live-action treatment, but this recent failure will stick in the minds of fans for many years. The platform’s next huge scale adaptation will be its take on Oda’s opus, a live-actionOne Piece.
One Pieceis the long and winding taleof a crew of whimsical piratesexploring the world on a search for a legendary treasure. As anime series go, it’s probably one of the tougher choices when it comes to adaptation. While it is popular on an almost unimaginable level, it has a unique style of wacky comedy and wildly varied action that make it a nightmare to recreate with real humans. Most fans knew that before the series was announced, leaving a fair percentage of them vocally hopingBebop’s failure was spectacular enough to dragOne Piecedown with it. This is a challenging environment for the series, especially because it’s coming to the platform courtesy of some of the same people.
The live-actionOne Pieceseries is being produced by Tomorrow Studios, a collaborative effort between British company ITV and Marty Adelstein, who will also serve as executive producer. Tomorrow and Adelstein also producedNetflix’sCowboy Bebop. While there is little to no crossover in the core creative teams between the two projects, ‘producer’ is a complex title, and it could cover a variety of concerns. It is fair to expect Tomorrow and Adelstein to serve a substantially similar role to the role they served onBebop, though it is difficult to know exactly what role that was.
On the low end, the producer is typically providing some percentage of the budget. This would suggest thatOne Piececould be working with comparable financial backing, which would hobble anadaptation of a seriesas visually imaginative as the source material. On the higher end, the producer often makes changes in a project to make it more appealing to broader audiences. so there’s no telling which decisions lay at their feet.
A live-actionOne Piecewas a tough sell from the start, but a take on the series from the purse-string holders of one of the quickest flops in modern memory is borderline tragic. No one has seen the first frame of Netflix’sOne Pieceyet. Its success or failure is not a settled matter by any means, butthe failure ofCowboy Bebopbrings a couple of unfortunate things into view. First, that the creators and owners of this cursed genre have almost never learned from their mistakes. And, more importantly, that they don’t have to. Don’t live in fear that Netflix’sOne Piecewill be terrible, rest easy knowing that if it is, it’ll be unceremoniously axed just in time to brace for the next attempt.
