The final season of Bleach received an update at Anime Expo in Los Angeles this last week: The fourth season of the final arc, the Thousand Year Blood War, has been given the subtitle “The Calamity”. The previous three seasons were subtitled the Blood War, the Separation, and the Conflict. The Calamity segment is scheduled to air on TV Tokyo in 2026, leaving 2025 the first year without new Bleach episodes released since the series returned on October 11, 2022.
The Bleach manga originally debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in the August 7, 2001 issue. The manga ran for 698 chapters until August 22, 2016, but the final arc’s chapters were never adapted to anime until recently. The anime, running for 366 episodes between October 5, 2004 and March 27, 2012, suddenly ended with the Fullbring Arc, leaving the final arc of the manga without an adaptation. As the series remained popular internationally, demand remained strong for a conclusion to the anime. The seasonal format of the final arc’s releases allows more time for consistently high quality animation. While the original Bleach was generally one of the better produced and most popular shonen anime of the 2000s, the lengthy Arrancar arc developed a reputation for having large amounts of filler episodes interrupting it. Some of these episodes were gag oriented one shot stories like a New Year’s special. Others were lengthy battle arcs, such as the Bount arc.
Bleach’s anime made it American broadcast premiere on Adult Swim on September 10, 2006. It ran new episodes on Saturday nights until November 2, 2014. While there was initially some controversy over whether Bleach belonged on Toonami or Adult Swim, by the end of its run, Toonami and Bleach had merged. The conclusion of Ichigo and Aizen’s battle gained Toonami its all time highest ratings. The recent return of Bleach to Toonami with the first season of Thousand Year Blood War’s premiere garnered the block some of its highest ratings in recent years. However, unlike in the original series’ run, Toonami was not the first destination for Thousand Year Blood War dub episodes. Instead, they have debuted on Hulu, a long time partner of Viz going back to the days of Neon Alley. It is expected that the fourth season of the Thousand Year Blood War will also make its debut on Hulu before making its way to Toonami, like other recent Viz releases such as YashaHime. In other countries, the Thousand Year Blood War has received streaming releases on Disney+ and Star+
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