Long before the likes of One Piece and Cowboy Bebop ever received live-action adaptations, and way before “Ugly Sonic” had his moment in the sun, the original live-action adaptation was based on Dragon Ball Z in the form of the heavily panned Dragonball Evolution, a movie so bad that many thought there would be no way another anime or anime-adjacent property could ever beat it.
Yeah… about that.
As first shared on Reddit, Season 3 of One Punch Man, specifically last week’s episode “Motley Heroes” is rated lower than Dragonball Evolution ever was.
It currently has a 1.4/10 rating on over 1,400 reviews, while Evolution has a 2.5/10 rating on 84,000 reviews. Things aren’t that much better on Rotten Tomatoes, where Season 3 as a whole has a 5 percent rating and Evolution has a 19 percent!
Many of the reviews have taken aim with the season’s “slideshow-like” approach to animation that is “shockingly bad” and “embarrassingly cheap.”
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It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t the first “slideshow” related controversy that anime has had in 2025, as The Beginning After the End was also similarly criticized and Blue Lock has been a constant source of hate, though it appears that things have reached unspeakable levels of bad with One Punch Man.
You Have To Be Ridiculously Bad To Beat Dragonball Evolution
Making a live-action adaptation of anything that was primarily animated is always going to be a struggle, and really, outside Sonic the Hedgehog, a lot of adaptations have been pretty mid. But few things could have prepared any of us for how bad Dragonball Evolution was going to be.
Attempting to tell the story of the original Dragon Ball, Evolution featured Goku going up against Demon King Piccolo, and none of it landed. The effects were horrible, the costuming was atrocious and none of the characters looked like their animated counterparts.
If you weren’t around for the debacle that was Dragonball Evolution, then consider yourself lucky. At the time, I swore no one would ever try another live-action adaptation.
Also, please go look at the horrendous PSP game that somehow is credited with being the first and potentially only time that Bulma was ever playable in a DB game.
Throw in some poor directing, bad acting and meme-worthy dialogue, and you get not only one of the worst anime-related projects ever, but also one of the worst film projects. Listen, it was so bad that the live-action Goku apologized to creator Akira Toriyama after his death for messing things up that badly.
All that is to say, if One Punch Man Season 3 has done enough to surpass all that, then truly what the heck is being broadcast? I’m not one to want to find out, so I’ll trust those who sat through the abomination. Seriously, if you watched One Punch Man Season 3 hoping it would reach the highs of Season 1, then I am truly sorry.
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