Japan Gets a Three-Week Bleach Marathon
According to a report from Famitsu, the Japanese gaming and entertainment outlet, ABEMA is opening its first-ever dedicated Bleach channel to mark the final season's arrival. The channel runs from 6:00 PM on July 25 through 6:00 PM on August 15, 2026, and airs the entire TV anime free every day. That means everything from the original 2004 series through the third part of Thousand-Year Blood War, all in one place.
The Calamity itself joins the free lineup almost immediately. Starting July 30, each new episode streams free on ABEMA every Thursday at midnight and stays free for one week. A second option lands on the ABEMA Anime Channel from July 31, with a free late-night broadcast every Friday at 2:30 AM (effectively early Saturday morning).
One catch for readers outside Japan: ABEMA is a Japanese streaming service, so the marathon is aimed at domestic viewers. International fans have their own simulcast options, covered below.
The Calamity Ends a Story 22 Years in the Making
Tite Kubo's sword-battle action manga ran in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump and has topped 130 million copies in circulation, holding a global audience long after its conclusion. The premise is anime canon at this point: Ichigo Kurosaki, a high schooler whose only oddity is that he can see ghosts, meets the Soul Reaper Rukia Kuchiki, inherits her powers, and goes from hunting Hollows in his hometown to fighting through the upheaval of the Soul Society.
The TV anime, produced at Studio Pierrot, premiered on the TV Tokyo network in October 2004 and has since amassed more than 360 episodes plus four theatrical films. The adaptation of the manga's final arc, Thousand-Year Blood War, began in October 2022, and The Calamity is its last stretch of episodes. It premieres Saturday, July 25, 2026 at 11:00 PM on the TV Tokyo network.
The long-running cast returns for the finale, with Masakazu Morita as Ichigo Kurosaki, Fumiko Orikasa as Rukia Kuchiki, Yuki Matsuoka as Orihime Inoue, and Noriaki Sugiyama as Uryū Ishida, alongside the rest of the series regulars. Most of these actors have voiced their characters since the anime's 2004 debut, which makes The Calamity a send-off for the voice cast as much as for the story.
ABEMA's press release quoted by Famitsu pitches the free channel as a way to revisit the whole saga before watching the ending, and with three weeks of daily reruns, a full-series refresher is feasible.
Looking Ahead
International viewers are not left waiting. Viz Media confirmed that The Calamity streams same-day starting July 25, 2026, on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ internationally, matching the arrangement of the previous Thousand-Year Blood War parts.
The source manga is complete and fully published in English by Viz Media, so anyone who wants to know how it ends before the anime gets there has that option.
The ABEMA channel closes on August 15, 2026, three weeks into The Calamity's broadcast. After that, the free marathon ends, but the finale itself will keep rolling out weekly on TV Tokyo, ABEMA, Hulu, and Disney+ as the anime heads toward the conclusion of a story that has been running on television since 2004.