Bleach’s Final Season Confirms Disappointing Episode Count For Hulu Return

July 25, 2026, 10:37am

Hulu has confirmed how many episodes Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War’s final season is going to be running for, and it’s going to disappoint fans who have been looking forward to the anime’s grand finale. Bleach is finally kicking off the start of its fourth and final season adapting the long awaited final few chapters of Tite Kubo’s original manga. It’s a grand finale for the anime that fans of the original series have been waiting nearly 15 years to see at this point, but it’s going to unfortunately not be around as long as fans hope.

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Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4 – The Calamity will be officially making its full debut in Japan later today with the first episode of the final season, and Hulu has confirmed on social media that this final season will be running for only ten episodes. This is three episodes shorter than the the first three seasons of this final era of the anime, and sadly does make sense considering that there isn’t much left from Kubo’s manga to actually adapt.

When Does Bleach’s Shorter Final Season Come Out?

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4 – The Calamity will be officially making its premiere on July 25th as part of the Summer 2026 anime schedule. It will be streaming exclusively with Hulu (and Hulu on Disney+) in the United States and Disney+ in international territories, and now it’s been confirmed that it’s only going to run for ten episodes in total. This does explain the later start for the final season, and does further confirm that it’s only going to be running through to the end of the Summer.

But unfortunately this makes a lot of sense. This might be the shortest season of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, but it’s also adapting a fairly short stint from Kubo’s original Bleach manga. There are about 25 chapters left to account for with these final episodes, and the first three episodes released in an early preview earlier this Summer already adapted the first six or seven chapters of the manga. It’s all going to be moving forward at a very quick pace.

Is This Really the End of Bleach?

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4 – The Calamity is the shortest season of this new era, but there’s also a chance that there will be new materials not seen in Kubo’s manga version of the finale. Much like how the first three seasons expanded on everything to give it a more fleshed out version of the finale, fans can expect to see the same here. But there are also new projects now in the works that fans are going to want to keep a closer eye on.

Bleach Mirrors High is a new video game release in development featuring a story developed by Kubo that takes place after the events of the Thousand-Year Blood War. It’s going to feature new characters, and that’s got to be exciting given that it’s a stretch of time left accounted for in the main series. Bleach also rumored to be returning to Shonen Jump sometime later this Summer with an official sequel series, but we’ll just have to stay tuned if that turns out to be true.

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