Netflix's 'One Piece' Live-Action Series: Budget Breakdown
Though Netflix has had mixed success with live-action anime adaptations, the streaming giant is going all in for their take on One Piece. For the first time in live-action, Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) and his crew of good-hearted pirates will be voyaging into the Grand Line to recover the elusive One Piece treasure. It's an adventure that is still continuing to this day, as the beloved anime series currently consists of well over a thousand episodes. The first season of the Netflix adaptation will cover just a fraction of that epic tale, and fans of the long-running animated show are understandably apprehensive of a live-action series. For starters, Netflix has not garnered the most outstanding reputation for its past attempts at bringing anime to live-action. The 2017 Death Note movie and the one-season-long 2021 Cowboy Bepop show alone don't inspire confidence. Despite the poor reviews and low viewership of both, Netflix still felt confident enough in a One Piece adaptation to provide a large enough budget to make the upcoming series one of the most expensive shows ever made.
To find out how the upcoming series required such a massive price tag, read below for a comprehensive budget breakdown for Netflix's One Piece. Keep in mind, since One Piece has not yet been released at the time of this writing, the information provided is partially speculative.
One Piece (Live-Action)
TV-14
In a seafaring world, a young pirate captain sets out with his crew to attain the title of Pirate King, and to discover the mythical treasure known as 'One Piece.'
Netflix's One Piece Live-Action Budget Broken Down by Department
Netflix's live-action One Piece adaptation reportedly boasts a budget of $18 million per episode, making it one of the most expensive shows ever made. To put into context how much that is compared to other massive shows, One Piece has a bigger per-episode budget than The Sandman, See, Game of Thrones, and The Mandalorian, all of which cost $15 million per episode. The shows that exceed One Piece's budget include The Pacific and House of the Dragon at $20 million per episode, WandaVision at $25 million per episode, Stranger Things at $30 million per episode, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power at $58 million per episode.
With the first season of the Netflix series set to be eight episodes long, the first season of the live-action One Piece will cost at least $144 million, which is about $40 million more than what the anime it's based on has spent in its 20+ years on the air.
Cast
For the show's main cast, Netflix largely filled it with lesser-known stars to play the iconic roles. This includes Iñaki Godoy (La querida del Centauro) as Luffy, Mackenyu (Knights of the Zodiac) as Zoro, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Romero (Greenleaf) as Usopp, and Taz Skylar (The Lazarus Project) as Sanji. The salaries for each of the stars are currently unknown.
VFX
Certainly, most of the budget for One Piece went to the visuals and effects, as Netflix really didn't pull any punches to bring the world of the popular anime to life. In an age where CGI and digital effects have become incredibly prevalent, it's admirable that Netflix's live-action One Piece will be utilizing plenty of practical effects as well. From the massive sets and ships to the anime-accurate makeup on characters like the clown pirate Captain Buggy (Jeff Ward), the fantastical world of One Piece is already coming to life. There will still be some extensive digital effects present as well, such as the massive sea serpent that Luffy and his crew encounter in the trailer.
Production designer Richard Bridgland detailed what went into the VFX and set design.
We only used visual effects really just to extend the world beyond the sets, but it was pretty old-school filmmaking. We built big sets, and it was like one after another. It really was important for ‘One Piece’ to feel credible and not feel sort of somewhere between a live-action thing and the anime. If too much had been visual effects, like, say, a lot of ‘Star Wars’ stuff is shot that way, it wouldn't have felt like a real world, and it was really important that by doing a live-action version, it felt like a real place, but just a kind of parallel world.
Shooting Locations and Sets
Netflix's live-action One Piece series was reportedly filmed in South Africa, Spain, and Mexico, all of which are located near the ocean, which is fairly important in a show about pirates.
Richard Bridgland shared just how large the sets were for One Piece.
“First of all, there were so many sets. This is such a big world. It was like designing four feature films because every two episodes is one part of the East Blue world, and then we move on to a completely new part. We don't see anything from the previous part. We see Garp’s ship and we see the Going Merry a bit later on crossing over, but otherwise, you just move on to all these different sets. We kind of had a running joke while we were making the show, my team, that our favorite set was always the next set that we were building because we fell in love with that one next.”
How Will Netflix Decide if the One Piece Live-Action Series is Successful?
The success of the live-action One Piece and its prospects of getting a second season depends entirely on how many Netflix accounts login and view the show in its entirety once it premieres later this Summer. Netflix is clearly hoping that the anime adaptation will be a big hit, or they wouldn't have spent the record-breaking amount of money that they did to get the show developed. Being the second-most expensive show ever produced by Netflix, the streaming giant is likely expecting viewership numbers on the level of their most expensive show, Stranger Things.
That being said, the odds of success for the live-action One Piece are something of a crapshoot. As mentioned earlier, Netflix didn't have great success with the live-action versions of Death Note and Cowboy Bebop, with both setting up sequels that haven't and probably won't be made. The good news is that, if Netflix's live-action One Piece is a success, they'll have a near-bottomless pile of source material to adapt from for many more seasons.
The live-action One Piece series is now streaming on Netflix.
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