Bleach's four-year revival is entering its last stretch. The Calamity, the fourth and final part of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, premiered July 25 on Hulu in the US and Disney+ internationally, picking up right where the brutal Yhwach confrontation left off. Here's what's airing, when new episodes drop, and what this final cour means for a story that first started airing back in 2004.
The Final Cour Has Arrived
The Calamity is a 13-episode run that closes out Thousand-Year Blood War, the adaptation Studio Pierrot began in October 2022 to finish Tite Kubo's manga after the original series ended without covering the arc. Episode 1 premiered July 25 at 7:30 a.m. PT (10:30 a.m. ET) on Hulu and Disney+, matching its same-day broadcast on TV Tokyo in Japan.
New episodes are set to release weekly:
Release Schedule
- Episode 1 - July 25
- Episode 2 - August 1
- Episode 3 - August 8
- Episode 4 - August 15
- Episode 5 - August 22
- Episode 6 - August 29
- Episode 7 - September 5
- Episode 8 - September 12
- Episode 9 - September 19
- Episode 10 - September 26
The remaining episodes are expected to carry the story through its climax, with the series finale rumored to run as an extended, hour-long episode to give the ending room to breathe.
Why This Matters for Long-Time Fans
Thousand-Year Blood War has been treated differently from the rest of Bleach's run from the start. Pierrot brought back most of the original voice cast, upgraded the animation substantially, and split the adaptation into four parts rather than rushing the material. The Calamity carries the weight of paying off threads that stretch back to Ichigo's very first fight with a Hollow.
For anyone who watched the original anime hit its infamous filler-heavy stretch and never got a proper ending, this final cour is effectively closing a loop left open for over a decade. That history is part of why the premiere has generated as much discussion online as any new series this summer.
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is closing out one of anime's longest-running unfinished stories, and The Calamity has ten weeks left to stick the landing. New episodes hit Hulu and Disney+ every Saturday morning through late September, with the finale still to be scheduled. What do you think, is Pierrot going to close this out the way the manga deserves? Come talk about it in the NerdBlocks forum.
