Released a week ago on Netflix, the One Piece live series made a very strong start around the world, without however breaking the records of other series on the platform.
It’s been a week since the One Piece series proudly hoisted its flag on Netflix. Released on August 31, 2023, the series has already achieved good audience scores for its first week of posting. The live-action adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s manga has racked up 18.5 million views (for a total of 140 million viewing hours for a 7:34 series) in just six days, according to figures published by the streaming platform. It is also at the top of the most watched series of the moment around the world, and especially in France.
If the figures are impressive, they do not break any records at the moment. If we compare with Wednesday, huge success of the year 2022, One Piece cannot rise to its level. As a reminder, Netflix announced that the series led by Jenna Ortega had accumulated 341 million hours of viewing in its first week of release. At the time, the streaming platform didn’t split numbers into “views” (i.e. full viewing), but the Netflix and numbers newsletter already lent itself to this conversion at that time: Wednesday had 50, 6 million views in just five days, a much higher score than the adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s work. By comparison, Squid Game was also at even more stratospheric numbers, clocking in at 571.76 million hours watched in just one week.
Anyway, the numbers for the One Piece series are very good and should not prevent it from landing a season 2. But a challenge now faces Netflix: to rally an audience that is not a fan of the manga . As such, the figures for the next few weeks will be telling. A priori, fans of Oda’s work binge-watched the series as soon as it was released. If the live-action series continues its rise, it will mean that the series has managed to appeal to a wider audience. Which would be a win for this series that would have cost a total of $144 million.
