After sailing strong for decades, the One Piece anime has hit rough waters on Netflix, with the platform’s latest data revealing a sharp viewership decline for both its new arc and the franchise as a whole.

Per What’s on Netflix, the performance of the current One Piece: Egghead Arc has been underwhelming, with the first part accumulating a total of 5.6 million views since its release in 2024 and the second part, which was released in 2025, garnering only 2.6 million views. To put that into perspective, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Entertainment District Arc amassed 19.4 million views in the same period, while the brand new 2025 release, Sakamoto Days, rocketed to 24.4 million views in the first half of 2025 alone.

One Piece Anime’s Netflix Engagement Is On a Major Decline

On the franchise side, things don’t look much brighter for the Straw Hat Pirates either. While the One Piece franchise as a whole is the third most-watched on Netflix with 174.1 million total views between 2023 and 2025, the data once again reveals a declining trend. After pulling in 77.9 million views in 2023 and 71.4 million in 2024, the franchise has only accumulated 24.8 million views in the first half of 2025, indicating a significant drop-off in engagement with the newer content. Interestingly, Naruto was the most dominant anime franchise on the platform for the first half of 2025, despite having no new content.

When it comes to the Egghead Island Arc, the most likely reason for declining viewership is the significant delay in its release schedule on the platform. New episodes of One Piece are broadcast on Sunday in Japan and are available for simulcast on Crunchyroll on the same day. However, those new episodes aren’t released on Netflix until the following Saturday, facing a delay of a full six days. It is also worth noting that no new episodes of One Piece anime aired from October 2024 until the broadcast resumed in early April 2025, which also likely played into global engagement for the franchise dropping off.

The fact that the issue lies with the release strategy is backed by data, which suggests that series without this delay can thrive on the platform. The simulcast Dandadan, which was also available on Crunchyroll, earned an impressive 27.1 million views, while even a 2023 Netflix exclusive, Record of Ragnarok: Season 2, pulled in 1.6 million views in 2025, rivaling the numbers for the brand new One Piece: Egghead Arc episodes. This proves there is a massive audience for anime on Netflix, despite Crunchyroll boasting a bigger library. However, for a weekly series as prominent as One Piece, timeliness is clearly everything.

It is concerning that Netflix has been unable to capitalize on the success of One Piece‘s hit live-action adaptation, while the streaming data also raises questions about the future of Netflix’s other major investment in the franchise — the upcoming remake from WIT Studio, titled The One Piece. News on the project has been scarce since its announcement, and this lack of information is especially concerning given Netflix’s past treatment of Moonrise, another WIT Studio project. While One Piece’s popularity will likely ensure that the new remake doesn’t fly under the radar like Moonrise did, the recent performance of the ongoing current anime proves that sheer popularity doesn’t always ensure high viewership on the platform.