As the kids say these days, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run has “broken containment.” For years, many Joestar enthusiasts have been waiting to see the cross-country race featuring the likes of Johnny Joestar, Gyro Zeppelli, and the other racers looking to make their dreams come true. Unfortunately, while Netflix did release the premiere episode earlier this year, the second installment of the Steel Ball Run has yet to reveal its release date. While episode two will arrive this year, anime fans are still dying to see Johnny’s return, and even a major comeback is begging the streaming service to return to Hirohiko Araki’s world.
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In a hilarious and scary new Instagram post, Axe Body Spray has created something akin to a hostage video where the company is demanding that Netflix release the Steel Ball Run’s second episode. Ever since the premiere episode, fans have been taking to social media demanding the anime’s return, posting a twisted image of Johnny Joestar as they make their voices heard. Axe, clearly, was more than willing to capitalize on this enthusiasm by creating a “faux” line of its product with the unsettling image slapped on the parody containers. While Netflix hasn’t responded, it’s clear that the campaign surrounding Johnny and Gyro’s comeback is only growing with each passing day.
The Steel Ball Run’s Release Schedule Explained
As a part of this year’s Anime Japan, David Production revealed that the next leg of the cross-country race would arrive on Netflix in 2026. As mentioned earlier, a release date hasn’t been revealed, though the anime franchise hasn’t confirmed what the next leg of the race will be structurally. As it appears currently, it seems that the Steel Ball Run will be breaking up its future release schedule based on the different sections of the race, meaning multiple episodes could be dropped at once moving forward. Considering that the original manga is one of the longest-running entries in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure history, we might be waiting years to see how Johnny’s story ends on the small screen.
In an interview earlier this year, the anime’s director, Toshiyuki Kato, discussed the difficulty in animating the current entry in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which might hint at why the anime adaptation is taking so long to continue. Specifically, Kato stated, “This would probably be difficult to animate.’ Simply because ‘there are so many horses in it.’ If we had been making it back in the days of the Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency, or Stardust Crusaders, I don’t think it would have been possible. Only in the last three or four years did we finally start to see a direction where we thought maybe we could pull it off. In fact, before we actually finalized the current animation approach, we made something like an in-house prototype of just under twenty cuts.”
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