Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War has one promotional video left in it, and the franchise used it. The official YouTube channel posted “the last” PV for The Calamity, the fourth and final part, on Friday, closing out the run with a look back at the road that brought Ichigo Kurosaki and Yhwach to the same room.
The dates that matter are close. Episode 49 airs on October 19. Episode 50, the series finale, follows on October 26. That ends an adaptation that started in 2022 and took four cours with breaks between them to cover the last arc of Tite Kubo’s manga.
The final broadcast schedule
The Calamity debuted on July 25 on TV Tokyo at 11:00 p.m. JST, with streaming in Japan starting the next day at noon. The cour runs 10 episodes. Anime Corner reported that the last two episodes were held back from the original broadcast plan to give the production more time, which is why the final stretch lands in late October instead of finishing with the rest of the block.
The final promo leans on memory. The first half revisits the events of the war, from the Quincy invasion through the fights that pushed Ichigo toward the confrontation the arc was always building to. Anyone who has followed the show for two decades will recognize most of the shots.
The finale screening
There is a send-off event the day before the last episode. United Cinemas Aqua City Odaiba in Japan hosts a marathon screening and talk session on October 25. Scheduled guests include Masakazu Morita, who voices Ichigo, Noriaki Sugiyama, who voices Uryu Ishida, original creator Tite Kubo, director Hikaru Murata, and animation producer Sadahiko Tominaga. Kubo’s presence is the draw. He has been directly involved in this adaptation in a way he was not with the 2004 series.
The music for this final part comes from jo0ji, who performs the opening theme “I-BULL,” and singer-songwriter 9Lana, who handles the ending theme “Rasen.”
Why this ending carries weight
Bleach ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2001 to 2016 and finished at 74 volumes. The manga has passed 130 million copies in circulation worldwide, which puts it among the best-selling series the magazine has produced. The original anime aired from 2004 to 2012 and spawned four theatrical films. Then the franchise went quiet for a decade before Thousand-Year Blood War arrived in 2022 with a production that looked nothing like the version people remembered from the 2000s.
That gap is part of why this final run matters. The 2012 anime ended without adapting the arc at all, so for years the ending of Bleach existed only on the page. Viewers who never read the manga are about to see how it finishes for the first time.
Kubo has said this part includes more original material than the earlier ones, and the expanded final battles are the reason the cour exists in this shape. Whether that means new fights, extended choreography, or scenes the manga skipped has not been spelled out episode by episode.
Viz Media and Fathom Entertainment screened the first three episodes in U.S. theaters on June 25 through 29, ahead of the Japanese broadcast.
Two episodes are left. One on October 19, one on October 26. After that, the Bleach anime has no more manga to adapt. For more on the season that is currently running, see our coverage of Black Clover’s return this fall, and if you want to start a finished shonen series from the beginning, every Demon Slayer episode is now on Prime Video.
Source: Anime News Network and Anime Corner, citing the Bleach franchise’s official YouTube channel
Featured image: Key art for Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War – The Calamity, via Anime Corner.
