Disney is renowned for making the most corporate, commerce-first choices in the movies it greenlights for production. For the past decade, it’s been turning its back catalog of animated masterpieces into soulless, forgettable, visually drab live-action slop. Usually, this kind of thinking produces really mediocre movies, but, occasionally, it yields an absolute gem, like The Lego Movie. Pirates of the Caribbean is a prime example. When the Mouse House greenlit a movie based on a literal theme park ride at Disneyland, it seemed like the height of artless, mindless filmmaking.
But, with visionary Gore Verbinski at the helm, action producer extraordinaire Jerry Bruckheimer cutting the checks, and, most importantly, Johnny Depp in the lead role as Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl became one of the defining blockbusters of the 2000s, and launched a megahit franchise to the high seas. But Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t the first megahit franchise to bring back the pirate genre.
Six years earlier, a little manga named One Piece debuted, and its own story of swashbucklers seeking treasure and fighting sea monsters proved to be a much more inventive, much more subversive take on those tropes than Pirates of the Caribbean. Depp brought a Keith Richards-esque swagger to the series, but the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are pretty conventional pirate films, just updated for a modern blockbuster audience. One Piece is much more unique, and much more interesting — and now that Netflix has brought it to an even wider audience, it’s overtaken Disney’s Pirates saga as the world’s best swashbuckling franchise.
The Live-Action One Piece Is Perfect For Pirates Of The Caribbean Fans
The anime adaptation of One Piece premiered in 1999, and more than 1,000 episodes later, it’s still going strong. One Piece follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, a plucky kid who gained the power of elasticity after accidentally eating a Devil Fruit. Luffy has assembled a crew, dubbed the “Straw Hat Pirates,” to search the Grand Line for a hidden treasure known as the “One Piece,” which will make him the next “King of the Pirates.”
It’s a great hook to get you in at the beginning, but the story isn’t really about the search for the One Piece in the same way that Cowboy Bebop isn’t really about tracking down bounties. We’re more than 1,000 episodes in, and Luffy still hasn’t found the One Piece, and viewers are still tuning in to see what happens next. In both cases, the writers and animators and voice actors ingeniously used this high-concept genre conceit to explore deeply human stories and universal emotions (that’s why they have such a widespread international appeal).
Although the anime still isn’t over, Netflix has already adapted One Piece into live-action, just like it did with Cowboy Bebop a few years earlier. Unlike with the Cowboy Bebop remake, the live-action One Piece is actually pretty good. Luffy is an inherently cartoonish, wildly animated character, so it was a daunting challenge to play him in live-action, but Iñaki Godoy has done an incredible job bringing that iconic character to life.
The live-action One Piece is the perfect show for fans of Pirates of the Caribbean. Whereas the Pirates movies got staler and staler over time, and we haven’t had a new one in a decade, and all the attempted reboots seem to be burning in development hell, One Piece is thriving, with two seasons under its belt and a third on the way for a 2027 release. Netflix is also home to the original anime, the anime movies, and the upcoming The One Piece remake, so One Piece has easily outranked Pirates of the Caribbean to be crowned the world’s best pirate franchise (a crown it’s arguably held since the beginning).
Release Date
August 31, 2023
Network
Netflix
Showrunner
Matt Owens, Steven Maeda, Joe Tracz
Directors
Tim Southam, Marc Jobst, Josef Kubota Wladyka
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Iñaki Godoy
Monkey D. Luffy
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English (US) ·