Bleach is a long-running shounen manga series started serialisation from august 2001 and the manga ending in 2016. It was one of the top 4 shounen anime series with the other 3 being One piece, Naruto, and Dragon ball. All these four series had enjoyed success from the early 2000s and are extremely popular even today in 2020. The Bleach manga had an almost successful run with specific issues towards the end in 2016. Naruto had a successful run of nearly 720 episodes, with the sequel Boruto running even today. One piece is still airing with over 950 episodes. Dragon ball super had a successful run with 131 episodes. Unfortunately, Bleach has not seen the same level of success as an anime adaptation. The anime ran for 366 episodes and was suddenly cancelled in 2012. The final story part of the manga called the thousand year blood war never got an anime adaptation ever since. Despite having enjoyed success during from 2004-2012, the bleach anime sadly had met a sudden end. It has stayed that way for a long time ever since.
A large variety of reasons could have been the cause of the downfall of this once famous shounen series. The main reason would be the Fullbring arc getting the anime adaptation. The animation quality and those aspects were good, however, on the manga side of things the story was not too great, and clearly, there was a fall in the quality of writing compared to previous story arcs. There was no official reason given for the cancellation. However, the three major factors would be increasing production costs, heavier competition, and Studio Pierrot, adapting two long-running weekly series at the same time. In 2012 naruto the anime and the manga were in its climactic finish with the 4th great ninja war. There can be reasons to assume that maybe resources from Bleach was diverted to the grand finale of Naruto. Since 2010 a lot of new shounen manga have also started gaining popularity such as fate series, fairy tail, My hero academia, one punch man, Blue Exorcist, Seven deadly sins,Demon Slayer, Fire force, Dr Stone, Jojos Bizzare adventure etc.
Maybe it was assumed. Bleach could no longer compete with these new shows. Without any official announcement, these are the logical assumptions for the cause of the fall of Bleach.
However, what Studio Pierrot failed to notice was the loyalty and faith of the bleach fanbase. The manga was still selling well, and a lot of fans tried to plea for this franchise to return. In 8 years the anime community has welcomed all these new shounen series. However, it has also wanted for the old series to continue showing their wish to see Bleach come back. There have been YouTubers, Content Creators, Social media Etc where Fans have relentlessly advocated for Bleach manga to get its full run. And things started to turn owing to the success of Bleach in other media.
In 2018 Bleach saw its return in cinema as a live-action adaptation of the first few chapters of the manga. This movie was well-received. It was not a Blockbuster hit with a lot of technical shortcomings both anime watchers, and manga readers would notice. But it was a commercial success with a box office of US $4,465,085. Clearly, the relative success of the movie showed that Bleach still had a dedicated fanbase eagerly awaiting the anime return.
Bleach Brave souls a mobile game, however, saw a lot of success owing to it being the only bleach game apart from 2011 ps3 exclusive. This game has been extremely successful with 9 out of 10 ratings on Playstore and over 25 million downloads thus proving the potential of the series. The people involved in the bleach anime have also expressed their intention of working on the anime through twitter and other social media. Online petitions for the anime to come back has seen over at least 100000+ signatures proving that the anime has a large dedicated fanbase.
The comeback
In Jan 2020 Tite Kubo, the author of Bleach was to get on stage to reveal his new project on Animejapan along with the bleach 20th-anniversary project. Fans eagerly anticipated the comeback of their beloved series. Things seemed like taking a hit because of the event being cancelled due to COVID-19. However, in March 2020, the announcement came. The new project called Burn, the witch was to get an anime adaptation this October and the bleach anime finally making a comeback. The thousand-year blood war arc was set to come out in 2021 as an anime. This news was welcome with joy and happiness by the anime community. After eight years, at last, the anime makes a grand comeback finally getting the full adaptation it deserves.
