Netflix
Netflix’s One Piece reveals its colossal budget: it’s more expensive than Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian
Netflix’s new manga-based live-action series has a higher per-episode budget than most TV productions.
One Piece, the upcoming Netflix live-action series that aims to adapt Eiichiro Oda’s manga of the same name - and by extension, the TV anime - is one of the streaming platform’s big bets for this year. A series that aims to forget the failure of another similar adaptation such as Cowboy Bebop; and for this, Netflix has gone all out, betting on a colossal budget higher than that of other world-famous series such as Game of Thrones or The Mandalorian, two of the most successful and best-presented television productions of recent years. This is clear from the latest reports published by CBR, which point out that One Piece’s budget per episode is not inconsiderable at 18 million dollars; almost nothing.
Netflix’s One Piece: one of the most expensive series
Netflix’s One Piece has a budget of around $18 million per episode, for a total of $144 million for its first season, a figure that is clearly more than generous for a television series. And let’s not forget that, aside from the outsized budget of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - the most expensive series in history - other series as powerful as Game of Thrones or The Mandalorian are below One Piece thanks to their $15 million per episode. Moreover, in the case of the HBO adaptation, it only reached those figures in its eighth and final season.
Returning to Netflix, it is worth noting that One Piece manages to triple the budget of the aforementioned - and canceled - Cowboy Bebop, which remained at around 6 or 7 million dollars per episode, which is not bad either. Figures that led to its definitive cancellation after the premiere of its first season due to the low profitability of its low audience.
However, if we put One Piece in its current context, its budget is lower than that of more recent series such as the aforementioned The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, or others like Citadel, Star Wars’ Andor, House of the Dragon from the Game of Thrones universe, or Stranger Things, whose fifth and final season won’t arrive until 2024 at the earliest.
Source | CBR