I usually never bother watching live actions, especially not from anime, but I’m actually excited about this, seeing how they handle the story of One Piece in the real world really piques my interest, even if I know there’s a chance it might be a big let down.
I watched Netflix’s adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events and I had mixed feelings about it. While the series mantained the absurdity of the books, it just didn’t translate well to the screen, imo. CGI effects weren’t so great, but the actors were pretty good. In the end, I was much more moved by the books than I was by the series.
One Piece has a lot of humour, which is One of the things that always made me prefer it to Naruto or Bleach; rarely a chapter goes by where Oda doesn’t add a joke in it. But I think I’d rather the Netflix adaptation had a darker, more serious tone. I also expect them to do things slightly different from the original source (would be a good way to keep manga readers and anime viewers interested as well) even if the end result is the same.
Like maybe in the adaptation they could have Pell die for real, lol. Small changes like that, that don’t have much of an impact in the overall story, but are still interesting.
I hope this succeeds and we get to see later arcs adapted as well.