Netflix’s big-budget, live-action adaptation of One Piece has already been dethroned from Netflix’s Top 10 ranking.
The TV iteration of the popular Japanese manga series lept to the No 1 spot on Netflix’s most popular series following its release on 31 August.
According to the official site for Netflix Germany, the budget for each episode of the series was an eye-watering $17m (£13.4m).
As of 7 September, One Piece has already lost its top spot in the Netflix US rankings to Shane Gills’ 52-minute, Beautiful Dogs comedy special.
In the UK, too, One Piece is second to Who Is Erin Carter? – the streamer’s new thriller series about a British substitute teacher (played by Evin Ahmad) who gets caught up in a violent robbery while living in Barcelona.
One Piece got off to a great start, ranking No 1 in 84 different countries around the world on its first weekend, surpassing a milestone set by Netflix’s Addams Family adaptation Wednesday and season four of the sci-fi series Stranger Things. Both shows ranked No 1 in 83 territories over their first weekends of release.
Emily Rudd as Nami in ‘One Piece’— (COURTESY OF NETFLIX)
The live-action series stars Iñaki Godoy as Monkey D Luffy, a character who goes on an expedition to locate lost treasure alongside a pirate crew that includes Roronoa Zoro (played by Mackenyu), Nami (played by Emily Rudd), Usopp (played by Jacob Romero) and Sanji (played by Taz Skylar).
Fans of the series have hailed One Piece for breaking the “curse” of live-action anime adaptations. Netflix has previously adapted more than a dozen popular anime properties, including Cowboy Bebop and Deathnote, although most have been poorly received by fans and critics.
Eiichiro Oda created the original manga upon which both the One Piece anime and the new Netflix series were based.
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Ahead of the release of the new show, which was developed by Matt Owens and Steven Maeda, Oda predicted that fans would potentially push back against the new live-action version.
In an open letter earlier this year, he wrote: “It’s absurd that the idea of adapting One Piece to a live action was conceived seven years ago! How was it possible to transpose such a world into reality?
“It took a lot of work… the efforts of the actors, the reconstruction of buildings and costumes, realising the situations so that they could only work in live action, the dialogues… and the commitment of so many people who worked together was already in itself something beautiful.”
Find the full list of every new Netflix release in September here, and a compilation of every movie and TV series being removed from the service in the coming weeks here.
