The WGA strike has come to an end and as such developments on some projects are moving forward again. The Hollywood strikes aren’t over quite yet as actors are still fighting for a fair deal, but there’s hope that those will be finalized soon. For now, the big movement forward is that the writers room for One Piece has opened according to showrunner Matt Owens.
The writers room is up and running, yes, getting scripts done so that we can get into design work, scheduling and pre-production, all of that kind of stuff.
Matt Owens
While discussing where they currently stand, he also highlights that they won’t start any castings or actor-related developments before the SAG strike has come to an end; such as highlighting the hiring of Jamie Lee Curtis as Dr. Kureha as a favorite.
In the same interview, Owens also highlighted that scripts for the second season aren’t done. Tomorrow Studios producer did reveal that they should already be ready to release the series as soon as possible but with the strike they seemingly only have an outline ready for now.
We did start our Season 2 writers room for a little bit before the strike. We didn’t get much further than starting to plan out what the season is going to be and got a couple of outlines done. But that’s as far as we got. So there are not actually any scripts for the season that are done. It’s still going to take some time.
Matt Owens
Looking at the positives of the current developments, Owens highlights that they can take in all the feedback the series released. They also already had talks with series creator Eiichiro Oda on potentially where they are heading going into the second season.
And of course, now that the show has come out, there are things to look at and lessons to learn as we move forward. We’ve got some outlines, and we have a really solid plan that we had communication with Oda about. Part of my trip in April was to talk to him about some of the early ideas that we had, talking to him about things that I want to include to just make sure that our ideas are in line with what he thinks.
Matt Owens
So, one thing is for sure: development has started in the second season. It’s hard to say if they will manage to start production next year but depending on how far they come in the next few months, we will hopefully get a clear case of One Piece’s second season will be released in 2025 or 2026.
Source: Deadline
