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One Piece Manga Gets Live-Action Hollywood TV Show
posted on by Rafael Antonio Pineda
The One Piece 20th anniversary event revealed on Friday that Tomorrow Studios, a partnership between producer Marty Adelstein (Prison Break, Teen Wolf) and ITV Studios, will produce a live-action Hollywood television show adaptation of Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga.
Tomorrow Studios is also producing a live-action television series adaptation of Cowboy Bebop.
The One Piece manga centers on Monkey D. Luffy, an aspiring pirate who, like many other pirates, dream of claiming the legendary "One Piece" treasure left behind by a legendary pirate. He gathers a crew and a ship and explores the Grand Line in search of the treasure, while also confronting rival pirates and government navies along the way.
Oda began serializing the manga in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine on July 19, 1997, and Shueisha published the manga's 85th compiled book volume in Japan on May 2. As of April, the manga has 350 million copies in print in Japan, and 66 million copies in print outside of Japan, with publications in more than 30 countries. The manga set a world record in June 2015 for having 320,866,000 copies printed worldwide as of December 2014. The world record is for "The most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author."
The manga has spawned a media franchise consisting of a long-running television anime that began in 1999, anime television specials, 13 anime films, video games, novels, toys, theme park attractions, and more. 4Kids aired the television anime by Toei Animation in 2004, and FUNimation Entertainment acquired the license in 2007. Cartoon Network began airing that anime the same year. Adult Swim's Toonami block began airing the anime in 2013, and removed it from the schedule earlier this year in March.
Viz Media releases the manga in English, and publishes the serialized chapters weekly every Monday in its English edition of Weekly Shonen Jump. The company also publishes the manga's compiled book volumes.
Source: The Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web
