Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Timeline Renews One Hope for Goten and Trunks

The next Dragon Ball Super movie, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, made a big debut at New York Comic-Con 2021. In addition to seeing the first footage of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, fans also learned a lot of exciting new details about the film’s story, characters, and timeline. Since then, Dragon Ball Super fans have been breaking down what we learned at NYCC, and connecting dots to what it could mean for other elements of the Dragon Ball Universe. One thing that has Dragon Ball Z fans very excited is the prospect that Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero will finally bring us teenage Goten and Trunks! 

We already know Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero will see some movement in time, as depicted in the character designs. As you can see above, the young Namekian guardian of Earth, Dende, will now appear as a teenager; Dende was the same age range as Goten and Trunks during Dragon Ball Z, so fans infer the two young half-Saiyans will similarly be teenagers in Super Hero. It’s a character redesign that’s been a long time coming (decades now): because Dragon Ball Super’s storyline is set before the final scene of Dragon Ball Z, the series has had to play some careful chess with moving the canon timeline (and the ages of its central characters) forward. 

Last we saw (leading up to the Tournament of Power) Goten and Trunks were still kids; they also had a brief cameo in Dragon Ball Super: Broly where they were similarly still kids. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero will be set after the Broly movie – although the creative team is playing very coy about the exact timeline of the film after that point. Dragon Ball Super‘s manga has moved the timeline forward significantly through its last two arcs (Moro and Granolah), and Super Hero seems to be playing in the spaces the manga has left open between its stories and the end of DBZ. That’s all to say: teenage Goten and Trunks making their debut in this next film is definitely possible.

More to the point: If Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero ages up Goten and Trunks the manga can take that baton and run with it in the next arc. Fans are ready for the forgotten Saiyan characters of Dragon Ball Z to step up (Gohan, Goten, Trunks, Pan) and Super Hero is looking like it could be the official launchpad to do it. 

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero will be in theaters in 2022.