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The story
At ‘ONE PIECE DAY ’26,’ currently underway at Makuhari Messe, two new films were announced: ‘FILM GOD VALLEY,’ set for release in summer 2027, and ‘FILM BAAD,’ due in 2029. While many on 5ch welcomed the news, plenty of comments voiced concern over the manga’s ever-lengthening run — now approaching 30 years — with remarks like ‘Finish the original story first’ and ‘It’s still not over?’
Users dug up graphs of tankobon sales trends and Weekly Shonen Jump’s circulation figures, sparking a broader debate about the ideal length for a serialized manga and how classic series should be brought to a close.
Mon, Aug 24, 4:15 PM
It was announced that two new films for the ONE PIECE anime will be produced back to back. While the long-awaited news sparked cheers from fans, some readers weren’t so thrilled about the back-to-back big projects, saying they’d rather see the source manga move forward than get more movies.
On day two of the ‘ONE PIECE DAY ’26’ event held at Makuhari Messe in Chiba on August 23, a special announcement aired right after the main stage program wrapped up, revealing that ‘ONE PIECE FILM GOD VALLEY’ will open nationwide in summer 2027, followed by ‘ONE PIECE FILM BAAD’ in 2029.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
If anything I want to be entertained for a long time.
You clearly don't read the actual magazine lol
He takes breaks pretty often, like for research trips.
They just want the story to actually move forward.
Oh, that's actually a smart take.
They even put out plum-and-kelp flavored snacks to match the show's setting lol
That kind of collab was never going to work.
But does ONE PIECE even have collabs or merch tie-ins?
I've never seen a kid actually playing that card game that caused a stir recently, either.
That'd genuinely be trash.
Keeping ONE PIECE going is clearly the better option.
Naruto is way better off just for having actually ended.
But these ones suddenly introduce new characters, like a past Admiral or Shanks' kid, and then you're left wondering why the manga never mentions them at all — it creates way too many continuity paradoxes.
They should just adapt one arc of the manga into a movie, like Demon Slayer or Chainsaw Man did.
Boys and girls: 'Huh? I don't read ONE PIECE.'
Middle-aged men and women: 'Huh? We're the ones reading ONE PIECE.'
(Graph is from 2011)
Oda's been dragging out a 'kids' story manga for 30 years now…
The original readers are all middle-aged now.
They should just hope it gets good instead.
Everyone already knows it's beyond saving at this point.
Even if you tried to make it good again, there are too many tangled threads that'll snag on something.
If he's going to do that kind of thing at this stage, I'd rather he save the idea for a new series.
Wasn't it Matsui Yuusei who said a manga is at its most interesting if you end it around volume 30? (creator of Assassination Classroom)
That's basically a famous quote at this point.
Kishimoto and I can talk on the same level, so we get each other.'
Oda: 'Leave the #1 sales spot in Jump to me as its ace.'
'Honestly I've been allowed to do just about everything,
and I've already done most of what past hit creators have done,
so I'm not sure what to do next.
What I want first is something like a 'target to aim for.'
Right now I'm a bit stuck because there's no one ahead of me.
If there'd been someone who had an even bigger hit before,
I could just chase after them,
but looking at the numbers, I ended up in the top spot myself,
so there's this feeling of 'what do I even do from here?''
If long-running series like this keep showing up, there's now a real chance you could start reading one and die before ever finishing it.
30 years in a weekly magazine is genuinely impressive, but please wrap it up before I die.
That's exactly what happened with something like 'Glass Mask' — plenty of fans who'd followed it since it started and were looking forward to the ending ended up passing away first.
(Though that one's basically been on indefinite hiatus anyway.)
You could even argue that ONE PIECE staying on top the whole time is itself proof that Jump was already washed up.
The drop from '96 to '97 is brutal lol
Dragon Ball — or really, Toriyama Akira himself — was just on another level.
Guess Dragon Ball, YuYu Hakusho, and Slam Dunk really were legendary (and maybe Dai no Daibouken too, just barely).
'94 to '96, when those four series ended, was the peak, and the very next year circulation dropped from about 5.8 million copies to just over 4 million.
From '97 (when ONE PIECE started) it's been a slow, steady decline.
And right in that transitional period you've got Rurouni Kenshin and Yu-Gi-Oh! carrying things.
His complex about it is out of control at this point, so what can you do.
Just looking at tankobon volumes, ONE PIECE crushes it with 115 volumes to Demon Slayer's 23!!
It's not selling anywhere near that well anymore.
[Sad news] ONE PIECE sales are cratering at an insane rate lolololololololololololol
https://greta.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/poverty/1785200713/
Volume / First-week sales
(Days counted in parentheses)
Vol. 100: 1,170,000 (3 days) ← the milestone 100th volume
↓
Vol. 105: 1,022,180 (3 days)
Vol. 106: 1,089,661 (6 days) ← end of the Wano arc
↓
(A pretty tone-deaf comment made around the end of Wano)
https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/rock1963roll/imgs/6/f/6f3d28f4.jpg
Vol. 107: 890,494 (4 days)
Vol. 108: 994,538 (7 days)
Vol. 109: 811,541 (4 days) ← end of the Egghead arc
↓
Vol. 111: 745,833 (6 days) ← start of the Elbaf arc
Vol. 112: 557,960 (3 days)
Vol. 113: 600,838 (6 days)
and all the characters had legs like Astro Boy and were flying through the sky or something.
What even was that?
As someone who doesn't follow anime or manga normally, I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
If you don't get it, don't worry about it.
Does it really need to end, though?
Plenty of classics are unfinished — Phoenix, Chojin Locke, Glass Mask, Crest of the Royal Family, Bastard!!, Berserk, Act-Age, and more.
Suzue (Miuchi, the Glass Mask author) apparently still intends to keep drawing it, at least nominally.
Hajime no Ippo, Golgo 13, Shizuka Naru Don, Cooking Papa, Fishing Fool's Diary, Shima Kosaku, Kaiji…
A real classic is one that stays entertaining all the way to the ending, though.
The ones listed above are only 'classic candidates' — they could still botch the final act and end up written off as duds.
So you're saying Kimi ni Todoke, Blade of the Immortal, and Kuroko's Basketball are the true supreme classics, then?
It's not that ending at volume 30 is inherently good lol
It's just that around there is the limit for wrapping things up cleanly with almost no contradictions, while it's still within the author's original vision.
I just re-read Ushio and Tora recently and it really reinforced that for me.
Fujita's (Kazuhiro Fujita, Ushio and Tora's author) current new series is actually pretty good, I'd recommend it.
You can skip Gekko Jorei and Souboutei, though.
Conan's the one that's really in trouble.
Guess it'll draw in all the Shakky fans.
Background and Key Points
The manga has run in Weekly Shonen Jump since 1997, making it a roughly 30-year serialization with 115+ tankobon volumes; the discussion sits against Jump’s own circulation slide from a mid-90s peak of about 5.8 million copies down to roughly 4 million after the “Golden Age” quartet (Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, YuYu Hakusho, Dai no Daibouken) ended in 1994-96, with One Piece launching right into that decline the following year. The film side matters too: One Piece movies have historically been non-canon, self-contained side stories, so FILM GOD VALLEY and FILM BAAD landing in 2027 and 2029 respectively read to some fans less as story progress than as another two years of merchandising around a manga that hasn’t reached its ending.
The thread didn’t split on whether the series is too long in the abstract — almost everyone agrees 30 years is remarkable — but on whether “long” equals “stalled.” One camp pointed to Oda’s consistent weekly output (versus, say, Detective Conan’s frequent hiatuses) as proof the story is still moving; the other cited declining first-week volume sales (from over a million copies for Volume 100 down to roughly 550-600K by Volume 112-113) as evidence of reader fatigue with the pacing, especially post-Wano.
What outside readers likely miss is that recent films have introduced characters and backstory elements (a past Admiral, Shanks’ child) that never appear in the ongoing manga, creating a canon gap unusual for the franchise. Also easy to overlook: Oda has said in interviews he has no living creator’s sales record left to chase, which several posters read as context for why the series shows no signs of winding down on a fixed schedule.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread ‘ONE PIECE Announces Two New Films Simultaneously, but Fans Worry About Story Delays: ‘Finish the Original First,’ ‘So It’s Still Not Over?’‘
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