Announced on Sunday at Jump Festa ’23, Kazue Kato’s Blue Exorcist manga will be receiving a new television anime series. A key visual and short teaser trailer for the series were released, with more information on the cast and staff to be announced at a later date.
The original Blue Exorcist anime premiered in 2011 and ran for 25 episodes. It received an OAV special that same year, followed by a movie in December 2012. Five years later, a follow-up season titled Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga aired in 2017 for 12 episodes.
At the outset of the announcement of this new Blue Exorcist anime, it was unclear if it would be a continuation of the previous seasons or not. Manga author Kazue Kato posted a message, along with a celebratory illustration, commenting that this new anime would be “original” compared to the previous adaptations. The new anime was referred to by the title of “Blue Exorcist TV Anime New Series”, with Oricon News later clarifying that it would not be a 3rd Season of the existing animation. Oricon confirmed that it would be a “new animation work”.
Given the amount of time since the previous anime seasons, and the staggered release schedules, a fresh start might make sense for the Blue Exorcist anime. The original season had detoured into anime-original stories for its final story arc, before jumping back to a manga-based plot for the second season. An anime-series reboot like that of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood could provide fans with the opportunity for an anime adaption that is accurate to the manga.
The Blue Exorcist manga has experienced its own stops and restarts. Originally running since 2009, Kazue Kato put the series on hiatus in July 2021, so she could work on an adaptation of Fuyumi Ono’s Strange Tales from the Handy Shop Karuyaka horror novels. Blue Exorcist resumed in May 2022 and the announcement of this new anime confirmed the manga currently has 25,000,000 copies in circulation. Whatever form this new series takes, it would seem the demand is there for more Blue Exorcist anime.
