If you were wondering why One Piece may have cost anywhere from a reported $15 to $20 million an episode, and why it has to perform well to be renewed due to its high cost, well, this is part of the reason.
Netflix has just released a new featurette on how important sets are to the series, which sounds kind of boring in theory, but in practice, it’s actually kind of neat, given the context of the show.
While obviously loads of CG effects were used in One Piece (I don’t think humans can actually stretch like Luffy?), the crew of the Netflix series actually built pretty much all the major pirate ships you see in the show, even the ones you only see briefly like Miss Love Duck’s. And of course, the Going Merry is a fully real ship as well, and it can be used well into the future.
This is actually kind of important, I think, for the prospects of the show getting renewed for season 2 and beyond. We saw this with Rings of Power on Amazon too, where Amazon fully committed up front to developing this sprawling universe with these big cities and costumes as something that would last them five seasons, hence all the initial investment they made up front.
Here, in One Piece, we’re sort of seeing the same thing. While it could have been a cost-cutting measure to just build little tiny parts of these sets or boats and film greenscreen for the rest, they actually built all this stuff. Now that the Going Merry is done, that can be used for really, all the rest of the seasons the show exists. Miss Love Duck’s ship, though not used much in season 1, would likely get more use when she returns for season 2.
The commitment to building all these real-life sets is actually something of a cost saving measure if the plan is indeed to bringing the show back for multiple seasons to get continued use out of them. Not that the show won’t remain expensive in other ways, but this is something we can join to the showrunners confident declarations that they think Netflix is about to renew One Piece for season 2 imminently, based on conversations they’ve had. One of the only questions seems to be is if season 2 would air in one chunk, or if Netflix will do their “split season 2 of a popular show in half” thing that they’ve been doing all the time now. I’d bet on that.
We will likely not know the fate of One Piece season 2 until a few more weeks from now, but I do think this show was developed both from the showrunners’ side and Netflix’s side to last a good long while here, and I don’t think there’s anything to be (too) concerned about.
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