One Piece Film: Gold

Eiichiro Oda took the role of executive producer on the picture, with Tsutomu Kuroiwa handling the screenplay and Hiroaki Miyamoto sitting in the director's chair. The action plays out aboard Gran Tesoro, a sovereign nation the World Government chartered yet cannot police, where the planet's pirates and millionaires converge inside a dazzling refuge run on games of chance and gold.

Presiding over it all is Gild Tesoro, who carries the Goru Goru no Mi. His mastery of gold reaches anyone dusted with the shimmering particles that rain down on every newcomer to his domain. His ambition threatens to upend the New World's balance of strength, and it is this scheme that pulls the Straw Hats into an intricate robbery.

Once the Straw Hats sail into Tesoro's concert, they are treated as honored guests and pile up casino winnings, right up until Tesoro fixes a dice game by way of Baccarat's luck-draining fruit. Buried under an impossible debt, the crew watches Zoro taken hostage and sealed in gold. From Nami's former associate Carina, they hear of a vault said to hold a fifth of the world's active money.

Deciding to loot Tesoro so they can rescue Zoro, the crew divides into groups to slip past the city's cameras, sending Luffy and Franky scaling the hotel's exterior while the rest sneak in dressed as World Nobles. The whole plan folds into a trap that exposes Carina as an apparent servant of Tesoro, and Luffy and Franky are cast into a golden dungeon, where the ruined hero Raise Max points out the single way to strip away the controlling gold.

The scheme proves instead to be a con aimed at Tesoro himself: Carina's actual design pumps seawater through the city and frees everyone from his hold. Furious and tormented by recollections of his enslaved love Stella, Tesoro swells into an enormous golden golem. As Sabo keeps Rob Lucci occupied and the crew picks off Tesoro's officers, Luffy shifts into Gear 4 to bring him down. Afterward Carina slips away with Gran Tesoro in her possession, and Nami quietly lifts Tesoro's rings.

Its runtime of 119 minutes makes it the lengthiest Straw Hat film to date. Despite carrying the executive producer credit, Oda also had a direct hand in the finale, redrawing more than thirty pages of storyboard for the closing minutes after finding the original take on the ending unsatisfactory.

Like its predecessors, the movie cannot be pinned neatly to the canon timeline, falling after the Dressrosa events yet requiring the entire crew to be together. It gave several characters their first film appearances, among them Rob Lucci, Spandam, and Koala. A Star Wars themed promotional short also ran ahead of The Force Awakens as a tie-in with the release.