One Piece will be breaking its almost three-decade-long tradition of airing an anime episode weekly every Sunday, as latest announcements by Toei Animation and producer Ryuta Koike have confirmed that the series will become a seasonal anime starting in 2026.
According to the announcement made by Koike in a news livestream, One Piece will significantly reduce its annual episode output, shifting to a two split cours strategy, with a maximum of 26 episodes airing per year starting in 2026.
Toei Animation explained that the new schedule is a deliberate move to improve the adaptation’s quality. The studio stated the change will allow future episodes to “incorporate more content, tempo, and pacing of the manga.”
This change will begin after the conclusion of the current Egghead arc, which is set to finish in 2025. Following the arc’s completion, the anime will take a three-month production hiatus from January to March 2026. The series will then return in April 2026 with the highly anticipated Elbaf arc, which will air in two cours, or quarters of a year.
For years, the One Piece anime has been criticized for its notoriously slow pacing. To avoid catching up to Eiichiro Oda’s ongoing manga, the anime often adapted less than one full chapter per episode, resulting in drawn-out scenes, prolonged reaction shots, and lengthy recaps. While the animation quality has seen a significant boost in recent arcs like Wano and Egghead, the pacing has remained a major point of contention for viewers.
This new seasonal structure for One Piece also reflects the evolving views within the anime industry, as the success of recent adaptations like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer has prompted many studios and production committees to rethink their strategies.
One Piece is not the first popular anime to undergo this transition as one of its fellow “Big Three” counterparts, Bleach, produced by Studio Pierrot, also followed a similar path.
Bleach anime originally ran as a weekly series from 2004 to 2012 before going into limbo. When the series eventually returned in 2022 with Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, it did so in a seasonal, high-budget format. This change was met with widespread acclaim from fans.
Studio Pierrot has since established a new division, Pierrot Films, dedicated to producing higher-quality seasonal anime, signaling a major shift in the industry away from the year-round weekly format.
Source: X, Livestream
