Watch the trailer on YouTube: LAST TRAILER | BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War Final Part – The Calamity
Fourteen years after the original Bleach anime bowed out before the manga’s final arc, Ichigo Kurosaki is about to reach the end of the road. Properly, this time. The official Bleach channels have released ‘the last trailer’ for Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War – The Calamity, ahead of the final two episodes, which air on 19 and 26 October.
Those episodes, 49 and 50 of the Thousand-Year Blood War run, were meant to arrive in September. After episode 48, the production committee pushed them back by a month to polish the animation for the climax, filling the gap with a ‘climax selection’ of earlier episodes. Given that fans spent ten years waiting for this arc to be animated at all, an extra month barely counts as a long blink.
The trailer builds to the final showdown with Yhwach, the Quincy king, who is attacking every realm at once with the modest aim of remaking reality to his own specifications. Standing in his way are Ichigo, Uryu, the Soul Reapers and the Arrancars, all obliged to work together. When Soul Reapers and Hollows end up on the same side of a battlefield, you know the villain has seriously overdone it. It’s the anime equivalent of a grand coalition government, only with considerably more swords and nobody arguing about the minutes.
The Calamity is the fourth and final part of the adaptation, ten episodes long, which began on TV Tokyo in July after its first three episodes were screened in US cinemas in June. Episode 50 will close out the Thousand-Year Blood War adaptation that started in October 2022 and, with it, the anime will finally have adapted the whole of Tite Kubo’s manga, which concluded back in 2016. Kubo has been overseeing a good deal of expanded material along the way, so even manga readers may find the odd surprise waiting for them.
In Japan the episodes go out on TV Tokyo in the Monday midnight slot. Elsewhere, the series streams on Disney+ in the UK and other territories, and on Hulu in the US, with VIZ Media handling the English-language release.
Bleach has been fighting, on and off, since the anime first aired in 2004. Two more Mondays and Soul Society can finally have a lie-in.
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