Netflix's One Piece Season 3 Is Avoiding House Of The Dragon's Biggest Problem

We already knew Netflix's live-action TV adaptation of Eiichiro Oda's "One Piece" manga would get a third season and adapt the popular Alabasta arc. Now, however, we know season 3 will arrive much sooner than expected.

Netflix has announced that "One Piece: The Battle of Alabasta" will debut in 2027, a mere year after season 2, "Into the Grand Line," premiered. As the title suggests, the show's third season will focus on Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) and the Straw Hat Crew attempting to help Princess Vivi (Charithra Chandran) stop a war that threatens to destroy the desert kingdom of Alabasta. But before they do, they will have to defeat the rest of Baroque Works, including their sinister and ruthless leader, Sir Crocodile (Joe Manganiello.)

This is incredibly exciting news, as it means the wait for "One Piece" season 3 will be half of that between seasons 1 and 2. It's also impressive considering the series is only expanding in scope with each season, introducing more factions, characters, and locations.

Most of all, this comes as a relief in the era of extremely long waits between seasons of streaming shows. To be sure, having to wait more than a year between seasons is one of the worst things about modern television. Likewise, the longer a new season takes to premiere, the more it tends to hurt the series.

Think of "Stranger Things" taking so long to wrap up that its main stars had become adults by the time its finale arrived. Similarly, "House of the Dragon" has killed its momentum with its prolonged breaks between seasons, and it's become the show's biggest problem by far. By delivering a fresh story every year, though, "One Piece" will avoid falling into the same trap as HBO's costly "Game of Thrones" spin-off.

There's been a lot of talk about the next big fantasy TV franchise ever since "Game of Thrones" ended. We've seen small screen adaptations of popular book series come and go without making much of an impact, like "Wheel of Time" and "Shadow and Bone." We've even seen HBO expand its George R. R. Martin adaptations into a proper shared universe, only to fumble things with a mediocre second season of "House of the Dragon" and an extremely long wait between its seasons. Even Prime Video's "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" has struggled to make waves the way the previous "Lord of the Rings" movies did (and I say that as a fan).

That makes it all the more incredible that "One Piece" has become such a success. It is, after all, a live-action adaptation of a manga/anime, which historically haven't been very well received. Not only that, but Eiichiro Oda's source material is also quite difficult to translate into live-action, seeing as it features everything from giant whales with tragic backstories (read: Laboon) to talking reindeer doctors, giants, and ridiculous powers like the ability to turn oneself into a jacket. "One Piece" is an epic journey set in a vast world, that's for sure, but it's still deeply silly and cartoony — not exactly qualities often found in prestige TV shows.

Again, that makes the series' popularity surprising but welcome. The setting of "One Piece" is huge, with countless side characters, a mythology spanning millennia, and a main storyline long enough to sustain decades of live-action TV. The question now is: Just how far will Netflix's adaptation go?

To reiterate, "One Piece: The Battle of Alabasta" will set sail in 2027.