Netflix may have actually pulled it off this time. The service’s live action adaptation of famed manga/anime One Piece is now online, and the reviews are starting to come in. Unlike other adaptation projects like this in the past, these scores are…quite good.
With 18 reviews in, One Piece currently has a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, a very solid score, especially given that this is not exactly traditional TV critic viewing material.
But more impressive is the 95% audience score with well over 1,000 review already. You may say “oh well it’s fans of the source material, of course they’d score it high,” but the opposite is probably true. If the adaptation didn’t live up to their standards, and they’d be its harshest critics, these scores would be crushingly low instead. These scores indicate that yes, they got it right.
We can contrast this to similar projects Netflix has done. Its adaptation of Cowboy Bebop has a 46% critic score and a 60% audience score. Their infamous Death Note live action film has a 36% from critics and a 23% from audiences. When fans don’t like something, they really don’t like something, especially if it’s cleaved from source materials that’s an all-time classic, and it just can’t live up.
One Piece is sprawling, both in terms of running time and likely budget. Season 1 here is eight episodes, most of which are close to an hour apiece. That’s a bit longer than most Netflix originals, but keep in mind this is an anime series that has run for quite literally over a thousand episodes. So yeah, I think eight hours is okay to start with here.
One Piece will have to perform extremely well for Netflix to warrant future seasons, given its budget, but obviously there is no shortage of source material to adapt if they want to continue it indefinitely. It is certainly starting out on the right foot with these kind of scores, and One Piece really is a global phenomenon, so that is likely to boost its prospects here. I do expect it to debut as #1 on the service as soon as the order is updated after its launch (dethroning incoming).
Netflix needs a win like this, a big budget series that’s actually received well and actually widely watched. Stranger Things is about to end, and they need something to fill that void. One Piece probably won’t reach that insane level of popularity, but it’s good, it has a passionate fanbase and it seems poised for a healthy lifespan, if audiences show up.
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