One Piece anime ends its 2026 run and returns in 2027

One Piece has aired its last episode of 2026. Episode 1,180 went out on Fuji TV on Sunday 27 September, and the anime's official channels closed the year by confirming the series will keep broadcasting in 2027 rather than wrapping up. For a show that has spent two and a half decades as the definition of weekly television, an empty autumn is the news.

The knock-on effect is a hole in Fuji TV's Sunday night line-up. The 11:15 p.m. slot One Piece leaves behind passes to Dragon Ball Super: Beerus from 11 October, an 'enhanced' rebuild of Dragon Ball Super with redrawn cuts, re-recorded dubbing and a restructured story rather than a new series. The Straw Hats are not being replaced so much as parked.

A slower Straw Hat schedule, by design

The break is the visible end of a decision made a year ago. Toei Animation and One Piece producer Ryuta Koike announced in October 2025 that the anime would cap its annual output at a maximum of 26 episodes from 2026, ending the near-weekly run it had held since premiering in 1999. The show then took a three-month production pause from January to March 2026 and returned on 5 April with the start of the Elbaph arc, which Crunchyroll streams outside Japan.

Toei's case for the change is that fewer episodes buy better ones. The studio says the new schedule lets the anime "incorporate more content, tempo, and pacing of the manga while continuing to leverage the unique storytelling that is only possible with animation". In practice that means a series which once aired almost every week now stops when the next stretch of animation is not ready, instead of filling the gap.

The source material is in no hurry either. Eiichiro Oda's manga has run in Weekly Shonen Jump since July 1997, has more than 600 million copies in circulation worldwide, and took One Piece Film: Red past 20.3 billion yen at the Japanese box office in 2022.

Our opinion

Trading weekly ubiquity for 26 episodes a year is the most sensible thing this anime has done in a decade. The old model forced the adaptation to live dangerously close to the manga's own pace, and a story this long does not forgive that: it is how you end up with stretched episodes, dead air and an audience trained to skip. Buying production time is the right call, even when the bill arrives as a four-month silence.

The harder question is the schedule. Fuji TV is filling the slot with Dragon Ball Super: Beerus, a polished rebuild sold as an enhanced edition, and that swap says something about where the broadcaster places its Sunday-night risk. Toei gets to argue quality over quantity in front of an audience that will still be there in 2027. Whether anyone under 30 keeps the 11:15 p.m. appointment while the Straw Hats are away is a different bet.