Netflix’s One Piece is coming back sooner than expected

The Straw Hats’ Log Pose seems to be working perfectly well as Netflix’s One Piece has charted a course to return to streaming with its third season much sooner than anticipated. As announced by Netflix on Tuesday, season 3 of One Piece is expected to arrive in 2027. This is a much shorter break than the one separating the first two seasons, which aired in 2023 and 2026.

Season 3 of the live-action One Piece show will be titled The Battle for Alabasta. At the end of the second season, Luffy and his crew set sail for the Egyptian-inspired Alabasta Kingdom, after vowing to help their newfound friend and nakama, Princess Vivi, to save her land and defeat the evil Mr. Crocodile and his Baroque Works group. Season 3 will thus adapt the Alabasta Arc from the manga, which was One Piece‘s first foray into a bigger-stakes type of story, with the fate of an entire kingdom resting on Luffy’s bouncy shoulders.

The cast from season 2 returns, including not just the Straw Hats but their new friends and antagonists too: Charithra Chandran as Princess Vivi, Mikaela Hoover as Tony Tony Chopper, Joe Manganiello as Mr. 0, Lera Abova as Miss All Sunday, and Sendhil Ramamurthy as Alabasta King Nefertari Cobra. They will be joined by Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña, who plays Luffy’s brother Portgas D. Ace, and Cole Estola (Oh, Mary!) as the flamboyant assassin with a heart of gold, Bon Clay.

Considering the time it took for season 2 to be produced, it’s a pleasant surprise that Netflix’s One Piece will already be coming back in 2027. However, a faster season turnaround could be the norm going forward. The One Piece manga is nearing its 1,200th chapter, and the anime is also getting closer to that number of episodes. If Netflix truly has the ambition to adapt Eiichiro Oda’s epic tale in its entirety, waiting almost three years for a new season is unfeasible, unless they plan to switch Iñaki Godoy from playing Luffy to portraying his grandfather Garp.

With the battle for Alabasta reaching a bigger scale than anything seen before, season 3 will be an important test to see if a live-action show can continue to adapt a manga that will only keep getting bigger, weirder, and more spectacular with each new saga.