A couple of months after Netflix’s One Piece Live-Action Series was released, in December 2023, the platform announced that it was going to deepen its involvement with the franchise and unveiled a surprising project. In collaboration with WIT Studio, Netflix revealed a remake of the anime titled The One Piece, aiming to present Eiichiro Oda’s manga through a new lens with modern animation. The announcement was well-received by fans, who have always looked forward to experiencing the beloved anime narrative in a refreshed form. However, the main reason this remake generated so much excitement was that it promised to fix many of the long-standing issues of the original anime.
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Toei Animation’s One Piece anime has now been running for more than two and a half decades. The studio has delivered over 1,000 episodes almost every Sunday, with only brief breaks along the way. Through this consistency, the show built a lasting legacy. However, as the series worked to avoid catching up to the manga, its animation quality suffered, and its pacing became a growing concern. In the latest development, Toei Animation announced major changes to address these very issues, changes that may have just rendered Netflix’s One Piece remake unnecessary.
One Piece Anime’s Latest Changes Make Netflix’s Remake Pointless
On October 28th, 2025, during a live stream in Japan, Toei Animation took the stage to announce several major changes for the One Piece anime starting in 2026. The studio revealed that the anime would continue broadcasting weekly for the remainder of this year but would shift to a seasonal format next year. According to the details, Toei will release 26 episodes per year, divided into two cours. The anime will go on hiatus from January to March 2026, with the first cour airing from April to June 2026 (Spring season). This suggests that it will then take a summer break and return with the remaining 13 episodes in the Fall of 2026.
This shift is seen as an ideal strategy, offering consistent breaks for the studio and larger gaps between seasons. However, the main purpose of this change, as revealed by series producer Ryūta Koike, is to adapt the final arc of the series with a more accurate tempo and pacing to better match the manga’s narrative flow. The One Piece anime has faced criticism for poor pacing for over 15 years, ever since the time skip. Until now, fans expected the series to continue its traditional weekly format, maintaining its legacy, while Netflix’s remake of the One Piece anime was meant to fix this long-standing issue, making it one of the platform’s most ambitious projects for new viewers. However, these new changes may have just rendered that project unnecessary, and several factors point to this.
First, Netflix announced The One Piece remake at the end of 2023, yet since August 2024, over a year later, there have been no updates. This is ironic, given that a project intended to fix pacing issues seems to be taking years to materialize. With no real progress shared and Toei Animation actively addressing the same problems through its new approach, it even suggests that the remake may have been quietly shelved. At this stage, it appears Netflix’s project was more about capitalizing on the franchise’s popularity than genuinely fixing its flaws, while Toei Animation is taking tangible steps to resolve those issues, and with breaks between seasons, the studio may even revisit and improve past arcs, as they’ve already proven capable of doing.
One Piece‘s New Changes Might Allow for Fixing Old Arcs
When the anime went on hiatus last time, Toei Animation didn’t keep One Piece completely inactive. Instead, the studio used the six months to remaster the Fishman Island Arc, condensing it from its original 57 episodes into a more manageable 21-episode format with improved pacing. With the new seasonal format, Toei Animation might continue this approach, remastering older arcs during the breaks between new episodes to refine the pacing. This would directly address the anime’s most persistent issue: pacing. The animation quality and storytelling have always been well-crafted; it’s the pacing that has long needed correction.
Meanwhile, Netflix’s remake, which many longtime fans anticipated primarily to see the post-timeskip arcs fixed, now faces uncertainty. With no meaningful updates and the project seemingly years away, it may take nearly a decade before audiences see post-time-skip arcs with a better pace in this remake. By that time, if Toei Animation continues its current strategy and fixes the pacing of older arcs, the Netflix remake could become entirely unnecessary. That said, if Netflix’s One Piece remake ever does release, it might span well into the 2040s, meaning fans could still be watching One Piece well into the next decade or two.
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