Live adaptation of One Piece is coming to Netflix on August 31st. For those who don't know, One Piece is the best-selling Japanese manga (comics) series. The story follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, where he explores the Grand Line in search of the mythical treasure known as the “One Piece” in order to become the next King of the Pirates. Here's why I think it will probably be a big deal:
- One Piece is the second most sold comic book in the world. The first one is Superman with roughly 600m copies sold, One Piece is second with 516.5m, Batman is third with 484m. Also, to give some perspective, One Piece is being sold in copies of ~200 pages, that's 5 to 10 times the size of Batman or Superman comics, and unlike those two it was going for only ~25 years, not 100+ years. So realistically it's already far far ahead of everything else.
- To add some numbers, One Piece has 1000+ manga chapters, 1000+ anime episodes, 15+ movies, 40+ video games and a Disneyland-like theme park.
- This time Netflix won't repeat the Witcher's mistake. The showrunners has shown great respect to the source material. Everyone from the cast are big fans of the manga. One Piece's author has spent a lot of time on overseeing the production.
- The rumors say that Netflix went big here and spent ~$18m on each episode of the adaptation. In comparison, the cost of Game of Thrones season 1 was around $5-6m per episode.
- There are some early reviews already. Everyone is overwhelmingly positive and claims it's the best live adaptation of anime/manga ever. To be fair, I'd be still cautious here since the bar is rather low – all previous adaptations were rather bad, so there is still no guarantee that the series will be on par with regular, non adaptation series.
- Back to #1, One Piece is more popular than Batman, and yet it's less known. Probably every person in the world knows Batman. And most likely every second person reading this post has never heard about One Piece. That's what the live series might change, it will open an already winning IP to an even wider audience.
It seems that the setup is great for the show's success. So, in my opinion, there is a fair chance that Netflix will push One Piece to eventually overstep IPs like Harry Potter/Batman/etc. What do you think, how can Netflix's stock price react to that potential? I feel that due to this weird nature of One Piece being the most popular but yet fairly unknown series, it's completely overlooked and not priced in. So if it turns out to be good, it should result in good SP bump, but I'd be happy to hear your thoughts and opinions about that
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