Revealed by former editors
Oda is OBSESSED with the openings of the movies, he loves movies with cool opening scenes, and if he’s in control, he would want to do the same for his movies.
Strong World
He told the team that it’s important that they grabbed the audience’s attention with the opening scene. So he gave them detailed instructions and images to guide them.
Another thing Oda spent a lot of time on is Nami’s last scene, the line “promise that you’ll come to rescue me”, he gives a number of suggestions on how its timing and tone should be like.
GOLD
Oda is a long time fan of Mayumi Kojima and sent her an enthusiastic invitation to create the music for this opening, and she also sings as a character. Kanaya was in charged of the dances, and he used motion capture for it.
The original title of the film was Gold Rush, but one of the editors at that time said “just Gold is enough isn’t it?”, and everyone else agreed and the title was changed.
The two editors both later dyed their hairs blonde, and Oda was really happy about that.
The slogan on the movie poster is chosen by Oda from numerous anonymous ideas. For Gold, the person that wins will end up getting Oda’s autograph. But it was the idea of an editor and when Oda asked who’s idea is this, he proudly steps up to claim his prize, yet Oda said “oh it’s you, you don’t need my autograph”, he actually didn’t get it and is still confused at what happened to this day.
The scene where Luffy grabbed Nami and Carina and leave them to Robin was designed by Oda, one where he even used his time for manga chapters to draw.
There was a week where the editor is staying up late to wait for the next manga chapter storyboard, and it just doesn’t arrive. When something did arrived, it was about 30 pages of movie storyboards.
Stampede
The original story is completely different from what we have now, the movie was originally going to be about Ace’s unknown love story.
After Gold, they realized Oda is taking in too much responsibility with having to work on both the manga and the movie.
As a result Oda has nearly zero input on this movie, he only did what is minimum as the original author and supervisor. And so Oda gave them a request, he want them to do things that are possible because Oda is not involved, things he can’t do. That’s what led to the early proposal that it’ll be a movie original story about Ace. The foundation of that story was the Ace novel that was published during that time. It was later changed due to the fact that it’s going to be a movie to celebrate the 20th anniversary.
