Lmao, someone said the viewers on the YouTube premiere for Geeked Week went from 10,000 down to 600 after the One Piece announcement... idk if that's true but if it is, that should be a heck of an indicator for Netflix what they've decided to take on (though they obviously knew that before). The live chat was also like 80% people just asking for One Piece the whole hour or so, so.
Though OP is insanely huge on YouTube in particular so I doubt it has much more overall support than something like Sandman or Umbrella Academy anyway, but still.
According to Wikipedia's list, Oda is the third best selling fiction author alive, who is guaranteed to outsell the #2 JKR and will likely outlive the #1 Danielle Steele.
It is the most successful comic from a single author of all time.
It's the #1 series in the largest comic magazine in the world and has been that for quite some time. Thus it is also the flagship for all of Manga. Take it away and Manga (not Anime) will collapse outside of Japan.
There's also the uncredited pirate media sector.
Sandman or Umbrella Academy are snowflakes compared to One Piece.
The question is does Netflix know what they have at hand?
Because honestly I have never seen any fantasy series on Netflix that was beyond mediocre in terms of artistic quality, except the Dark Crystal series but that was the Jim Henson Company and we know they are the masters of puppets.
Usually it is tame teenager stuff, low budget and with horrible scripts. Out of the series you mentioned, I saw the first season of Umbrella Academy and must say I could write a dozen such series per month. Everything was predictable, the conflicts, the mysteries. The overall concept is cliche and overused. I suppose it has comics, and might be well done from that angle but as someone who did not know them it did not hook me up.
Heck maybe I even watched the second season, don't remember much. The Octobelly Ghost guy dies entirely, right? I think I remember. They burned their only creative character design in favor of five turds an elementary school kid could invent.
What I miss is any of the showrunners actually voice out his vision of the thing. Not that that is worth too much, as we know from GoT, but the fact that they are very silent on that makes me worried. I'm hoping they didn't just hire some *1985 directors that watched Dragon Ball as kids to simply mass produce this as just another show.
The more they hype without explanations, the more suspicious I get. What is their general idea what One Piece is all about, what audience will they aim this at, how much will they cover, why actor x for role y (beyond just the looks that everyone can see but that hardly says anything about the quality).
I like that they're making the figureheads look more true to how real life ships would look. Having a big round sheep head with a thin line for a smile would look so out of place with everything else being adapted to look like a real life pirate setting
I hate it. It completely misunderstands the aesthetic of Oda's world. It's an anachronistic and wild mix. There are things that should absolutely look realistic. Like Alubarna or Shandora for example. Then there are things that should not. Like Merry.
Not every crew has a cartoon ship. By taking this away from Luffy, they feed into my deepest concern. The Christopher Nolan inspired craze for darkness and realism in comic movies. Absolutely hate these movies his Gotham looks like Frankfurt am Main. But Yeah left a big impact and now every comic adaptation to film or series tries to be realistic unless they have the budget for a video-game esque cgi aesthetic like the MCU, which looks equally bad.