After many years, Bleach is finally back to finish what it started. The original anime was one of the longest-running hits back in the early 2000s, but how many episodes will Thousand-Year Blood War have to finish the story?
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How Long is Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War?
For those unaware, it’s important to stress just how long the Thousand-Year Blood War is in Bleach’s manga. This is not just another season, but a deep and long saga.
Bleach’s Thousand-Year Blood War spans over 206 chapters, just under one-third of the entire Bleach manga.
Considering that the other two-thirds have been adapted into around 300 episodes (roughly accounting for fillers), you get an idea of the potential scale of Thousand-Year Blood War.
So, we can be confident in saying that the Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War anime won’t be a one-cour run, but how many episodes is it getting in total?
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Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War's Confirmed Episode Count
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War will have a total of 52 episodes. These will be split into four cours with some breaks in between.
Thousand-Year Blood War's episode count of 52 is considerably shorter than some fans previously predicted. Based on previous adaptation speeds, I first speculated it to be around 108 episodes long, and potentially longer.
Not counting filler episodes, the last three non-filler seasons – 12, 14 and 16 – progressed at a speed of just over 2 chapters per episode. If that pace continued in TYBW, there would be around 100 episodes of content.
Most contemporary anime adaptations fall into 12 or 13-episode cours, accounting for each anime season. Therefore, 108 episodes – or 9 12-episode cours – would have made sense.
With Thousand-Year Blood War having an episode count less than half that prediction, it has unsurprisingly been adapted considerably faster than the average Bleach series before.
How Many Episodes Will Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Season 2 Have?
While it's unconfirmed how many episodes Thousand-Year Blood War Season 2 – The Separation – will have, it will probably be very similar to the first season's 13-episode run.
While some are referring to The Separation as the next season of Bleach, it's also being referred to as the next cour in the larger TYBW arc. We know it will be a one-cour run again, so the final episode count will likely be somewhere between 11 and 13 episodes.
There were some early rumours that The Separation may have 14 episodes, but this is unconfirmed as of this writing. Due to how anime seasons work in Japan, a 14-episode run would be very unlikely.
Once an episode count for Thousand-Year Blood War Season 2 is officially confirmed, we will update this page.
How Many Seasons Will Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Have?
While we know the total episode length of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, there's little confirmation about how the cours will be arranged beyond Season 2.
It was confirmed that there will be some breaks in-between Thousand-Year Blood War's cours, meaning we're unlikely to see a continuous, multi-cour run like the previous Bleach series.
However, we still don't know if that means there will be four distinctly separated cours, or if the final two may be connected.
Right now, it looks like announcements are being made at the end of each cour. Of course, if there is any news, we'll update this page.
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