One Piece Anime Reveals New Schedule With Elbaph Arc Starting April 2026
Toei Animation has announced a revised production and broadcast schedule for the One Piece anime. The Elbaph Arc is confirmed to begin airing in April 2026. The announcement was made during the One Piece News livestream on the franchise’s official YouTube channel.
The current 2025 broadcast will wrap with a total of 38 episodes, made up of 33 main episodes and 5 specials. After that, the series will pause from January through March 2026. When it returns in April, the broadcast format will change in a meaningful way: recap episodes are being removed, and the series will move to a seasonal airing structure rather than continuous weekly broadcasting.
The shift to a seasonal format mirrors how many other long-running shounen anime have been handled in recent years. For One Piece specifically, removing recap episodes and pausing between arcs is designed to improve animation quality and give the production team adequate time to deliver each arc properly rather than rushing to fill weekly timeslots.
My take: This is the right call and fans have wanted something like it for a long time. The Egghead Arc showed what One Piece looks like when Toei has time to do the work properly, and carrying that approach into Elbaph is genuinely exciting. The wait from January to April will be worth it if the result is an Elbaph adaptation that does the arc justice.
