Will the Bleach Anime Ever Make a Comeback?

Poor Ichigo Kurosaki. What was once arguably the most popular anime franchise around, Bleach has seen better days. With both the anime and manga ending, fans are left wondering if they’ll ever see a return to the Soul Society on television. Though the franchise is far from completely dead, having been given a live action movie that aired on Netflix and spawning a number of spin off comics and novelizations, it seems as though there are no current plans to bring Bleach back into the world of anime. Are the prospects for a revival doomed or is it possible we could see the Shinigami return in the future?

In our opinion, long story short, we’ll eventually see a Bleach anime come back to television. The franchise has just made too big of a mark to ignore and there are still steady releases through different mediums that enter into the world of these grim reapers to ignore. Ichigo and company continue to make appearances in video games focusing on the franchise, as well as through merchandising and spin off stories and we figure it’s only a matter of time where the creator of the franchise, Tite Kubo, decides to revisit the world.

The most obvious spin-off stories that we think would be ripe for an anime would be either Burn The Witch and/or Can’t Fear Your Own World. Both explore different sections and characters of the franchise, with the latter acting more as a sequel than a side story. The former instead decided to focus on witches working for Soul Society, taking a step back from the regular protagonists of Ichigo and the usual cast of characters found in Bleach.

There’s still plenty of material to mine in the franchise of Bleach, though the series would need to avoid the pitfalls that had resulted in its eventual end for both the anime and the manga. Whether Kubo himself, or another creator, was willing to revisit the world, the series was just too popular to keep buried and we truly do believe it will only be a matter of time before we see Soul Society return to anime in some form or fashion.

Do you think Bleach will ever come back as an anime series? Would you like to see it return as a direct sequel or as a spin off? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and Bleach!

Bleach was first created by Tite Kubo for Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, running from 2001 to 2016. The series follows the young delinquent Ichigo Kurosaki, who has the ability to see spirits. He soon obtains the power of a Soul Reaper – one meant to usher lost souls to the afterlife – and now has the duty to defend the living world from monstrous dark spirits known as Hollows. It has been adapted into English thanks to VIZ Media, and has sold over 900 million copies in Japan.