One Piece Creator Saved Netflix’s Live-Action Series With Big Change During Production

October 26, 2026, 1:14pm

It turns out One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda saved the production of Netflix’s live-action series adaptation with a major change to its budget and scripts as revealed by one of the showrunners behind it all. Netflix’s One Piece live-action series has been hailed as one of the most beloved adaptations in recent memory, and it’s because all those involved have seemingly been huge fans of the original work. And helping in that matter is the fact that the creator himself has been greatly involved with it as well.

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Speaking with the Trash Taste Podcast, One Piece live-action series showrunner Steven Maeda opened up about how directly involved series creator Eiichiro Oda has been with the adaptation. Revealing that it took so long for that first season to get off the ground was because the scripts went through multiple versions with executives at Netflix threatening to cut the budget in half before Oda himself intervened, “This is not what I signed up to do.”

How One Piece Creator Saved Netflix’s Live-Action Series

As Maeda explained about the process, the initial drafts of the scripts were written for ten episodes for its debut season. But a new Netflix executive came to look at the scripts and noted “I like this, but it’s got to be way, way cheaper. We want you to cut the budget in half, and it’s going to be cut down into eight episodes now instead of the ten.” Maeda noted how the One Piece fans would not be happy with such changes because they couldn’t “afford to do the things that we sort of promised to do.” But they went back and tried for eight episodes anyway.

Maeda then explained how they went and re-wrote the season with eight episodes, but had to change some things due to the lower budget from Netflix, “I thought it was a very potentially good first season of television, but it was really getting farther and farther away from the One Piece storytelling. As a result, I was very worried they were going to pull the plug.” Maeda then explained that Oda read it and did not like it, telling Netflix “This is not what I signed up to do.” Netflix then reconsidered, and came back with the reveal that they were going to give the show the budget to do the version the team wanted to do.

What Does This Mean for Netflix’s Live-Action One Piece Future?

With this retooling of One Piece to the eventual version that made its debut, it proved to be a success enough that it was picked up for two more seasons. Maeda explained that the series was actually picked up for Seasons 2 and 3 at the same time, and that was partly due to the fact that Netflix wanted to reduce the wait time between each of the seasons to avoid the aging of the cast and other potential production wait times. Maeda is hopeful that the series is picked up for Seasons 4 and 5 in the future, but we’ll just have to wait and see what’s next.

One Piece: The Battle of Alabasta is currently scheduled to release with Netflix sometime in 2027, but no concrete release date as of this time. This is the third season of the series adapting the biggest arc yet, so it’s not quite clear if the live-action series will decide to end with this next batch of episodes. How have you been liking One Piece’s live-action series so far? Let us know all of your thoughts about it so far.