Sketch

It could go either way. The two weeks off has put them in the position to either run a LBW marathon and finish JoJo on October 31st or run the regular lineup on LBW so they can finish JoJo on October 24th and be able to start a new show and Fire Force season 2 the weekend after Halloween. They can also run marathons on LBW and Halloween, leaving the final episode of Golden Wind for the first Saturday in November. I think given the current state of things they will forego a LBW marathon and do a Halloween night marathon but that would mean starting another show (probably a rerun) on LBW. Ballmastrz will finish on August 29th. If it’s a rerun, they probably won’t be hesitant to start a show that weekend. But it seems equally likely that they’ll do a LBW marathon to buy another week for Black Clover and Fire Force season 2. And then they can still choose wether or not to have a marathon on Halloween night.

Let’s be real. They are probably (wisely) going to put off starting Fire Force season 2 until November. But I suppose a week or two with double FF reruns could also happen. JoJo won’t finish until October 24th or 31st or November 7th depending on LBW and Halloween marathons.

DBS on managed 0.18 so JoJo getting 0.17 is good retention but it’s still yikes across the board. Perhaps two weeks of Batman double features will convince WarnerMedia that Toonami needs a DC show as its headliner.

That helps but I don't think it will be enough for them be able to continue Black Clover without any additional multi-week breaks.

They likely needed to be behind Japan a few weeks so they had materials for dubbing and now can dub 2-3 episodes a month. Maybe consistently 3 a month. Definitely not just 1 a month.

I guess a reasonable expectation would be... SAO WoU Part 2 and Fire Force season 2 both start on October 24th. SAO is replaced by Mob season 2 or something else early in 2021 while Fire Force continues another 13 weeks. Then both Fire Force and SAO's replacement could be replaced by season 2 of Neverland and Dr. Stone respectively. At some point Clover probably has to take a break for 6-12 weeks before it can continue airing without another break. It probably won't be replaced by anything new so Toonami would be down to 3 premieres temporarily. If Yasha-Hime does indeed start airing in Japan this Fall, it could probably start airing on Toonami in Spring of 2021 maybe sooner if Ocean Group can dub it quickly over in Canada (I certainly hope they don't switch recording studios). That show might actually end up being a long runner. By the end of the year they might actually be up to 5-6 premieres again if they get Bleach's final season and either Blade Runner or Fena are ready to air. And I'm just gonna plant this thought now. September 2021 will be the 20th anniversary for Adult Swim and also the 20th anniversary of the broadcast of Cowboy Bebop. I've gotta figure they wouldn't pass up that opportunity to run Bebop again but just around 2:30 or 3am. Even if they do that they can still fill 5-6 slots with premieres by September. But with COVID-19 around a 3 month turnaround for Neverland and Dr. Stone may not be in the cards. The start of 2021 will probably be better than now but far from great. But they should be able to build from there. Unfortunately they're all but certain to keep DBS leading off Toonami until it reaches episode 131 again. At the rate of once a week with some weeks off, that's gonna last into next Summer. However, if they have a large enough budget they could potentially expand Toonami so DBS is back to 11:30pm and free up 12AM for fresh content. I definitely hope we don't have to wait until October for new episodes of anything other than JoJo, BC and Shippuden but that is likely all we're gonna get unless Toonami was actually planning to start a new show whenever Black Clover needs to take a break or when Ballmastrz finishes. Fire Force will be at 1am for now but since it's a rerun they can always move it to 1:30 and either demote JoJo or place a fresh show at 1am. But I kinda figure if they had something else coming it would have replaced Mob or Paranoia Agent in August. That's still not out of the realm of possibilities but I think we'd be deluding ourselves if we actually expect Ballmastrz or Black Clover to be replaced by a network premiere. But yeah, 2021 should be much better than 2020 and maybe even better than 2018 if they have the money for the sequel seasons and still have some left over for other acquisitions.

Bare in mind, no JoJo and maybe no Food Wars or Mob. It will definitely be better than most of this year but basically the only non-sequels look to be the co-pros and I don’t think all 3 will air in 2021 at this rate. BRBL definitely seems far off when they are only showing two screen shots so far. I think Fena will air because it looks to have some finished animation if that wasn’t just test footage like Uzumaki’s trailer was. Bleach and Shaman King are hardly guaranteed to be dubbed any time next year. I also don’t expect more than 4 premieres at a time. Maybe 5 when originals are airing but unless they get a nice budget increase they might not even be able to afford all the upcoming sequels.

With the pandemic being far from done in the US. I’m pretty confident Toonami will remain very lean in 2021. Neverland, Titan and Dr Stone and more MHA are pretty much assured along with Uzumaki (probably in March or Summer), Fena (Summer or Fall) and BRBL (Fall if not 2022). DBS is likely to keep the top spot until Summer. I strongly suspect Yasha-Hime will start airing early in 2021 and Bleach might start airing by Fall of 2021. Maybe they’ll get the 2021 Shaman King anime as well but I don’t see them acquiring much else. I’m optimistic that Mob season 2 will air in 2021 and Food Wars could also return. 2021 is gonna be sequel city.

If they already spent most of the years budget on just SAO and Fire Force, then they really have no choice but to air reruns until they can start airing the dubs they already made deals for. They ain’t got no money. And it really sucks because if they had budget to spare they could have filled the block with shows that were bound to be passed over for the upcoming seasons of Attack on Titan, Dr. Stone, The Promised Neverland (all delayed till 2021 but originally set for 2020) and the currently airing seasons of SAO and Fire Force. It would have been a great year to air KonoSuba, Blood Blockade Battlefront, Gridman, ReZero or much older anime like Tiger & Bunny, Psycho-Pass, Jormungand, Log Horizon. Some of which have sequels coming. But nope, they ain’t got no money. So it’s reruns and one show returning from the glory days of ASA.

Even if those companies did want their 2010 shows on Toonami, they probably have minimum expectations to meet for the Japanese production committee (let’s use JPC for short) to be satisfied. And streaming services bid higher than Toonami is willing to for most series. Streaming is where the money is now and JPC really only ever push for bread and butter shounen and toyetic anime to get a TV broadcast these days. DeMarco and Manning had to negotiate directly with TMS and Sunrise for Lupin and Gundam respectively. I’m not so sure anime streamers necessarily even have the TV rights to several of their catalog titles. FUNimation and Viz probably do but I don’t know about Sentai. Sentai doesn’t even have the streaming rights to some anime they sub-license. Discotek and RightStuf usually don’t buy the TV rights and often don’t even maintain the streaming rights to the shows they publish here. CR is possibly the biggest question. I’m inclined to think they usually don’t obtain the TV rights and even when they do have them, I would bet they have to answer to the JPC regarding any TV deals. I even suspect CR isn’t free to do whatever the CR co-pros because they are only part of the production committee and not the sole owner. Basically, due to business bullshit it’s going to be rare for anyone to give Toonami a sweet deal on any anime, even 10+ year old obscure ones. But I also doubt that DeMarco, Austin and Manning usually dig deep when they have an opening to fill. So there are probably still plenty of budget friendly anime that they haven’t looked into. And they probably are of the mindset that newer shows will do better more often than not. I would argue less visible shows that have been buried in the sea of anime from 5-10 years ago could potentially do better than a popular show that recently streamed dubbed. It certainly worked for Michiko & Hatchin in 2015 though much has changed in 5 years. If a dub exists in it’s entirety on Netflix, Hulu or a dedicated anime service then you can’t really expect people to have much desire to watch that same show at the pace of one episode a week. That’s why dub premieres are crucial for Toonami and not being a whole season behind a simuldub is preferable as well. Toonami can still shed some light on more obscure anime though and I think they should.

JoJo is supposedly done recording the remaining 10 episodes. It was all done from home. Netflix released a few complete seasons dubbed from home. CR has finished dubbing Tower of God, My Life as a Villainous and Iruma-kun from home. Debatably both CR and Netflix are getting shows dubbed faster than FUNimation. I have every reason to believe WoU will finish being dubbed using the home method. But I don’t think they started dubbing it quite yet. FUNimation dubs a lot more shows than CR or Netflix on average and at the point COVID-19 hit, was in the middle of dubbing more than a dozen series simultaneously. They had to scale that back to a few and then a handful and now have increased that output. They prioritized MHA immediately and then seemed to finish out Winter season shows with smaller casts and started Fruits Basket as the Spring season began. They seemingly stopped dubbing Black Clover for a while, probably because it was taking a production break in Japan but in the past two months they prioritized Clover while trying to finish out more Winter anime and release more Fruits Basket. Railgun also got prioritized during that time. They dubbed two episodes of Fire Force early but then it took three weeks for the 3rd episode. FF will no doubt be a priority now along with Fruits Basket and Black Clover. Aside from continuously dubbing those three and releasing episodes as often as they can (roughly 2-3 a month) they look to be trying to dub an additional 3-5 finished seasons that we’re partially completed before COVID-19 hit. Obviously they try to prioritize their most popular series but they don’t want to leave the rest entirely by the wayside until they can dub in the studio again. I think they are doing an admiral job balancing big and small titles but they simply have a lot more to do than CR or Netflix so they don’t seem as efficient with dubbing from home. The smaller workload makes all the difference. Now that Tower if God is finished, CR will probably be dubbing God of High School and maybe ReZero season 2. Meanwhile, FUNimation hasn’t quite finished every dub that started in Winter but they are close. Some shows continued into Spring. They just started dubbing Love is War season 2 which Simulcast during the Spring season. I think they are dubbing Clover, Fruits Basket and Fire Force just about as quickly as they can due the size of their casts and how much more work balancing the sound of 20 or more home studios is compared to using the same booth. That process probably could not be sped up even if FUNi limited themselves to only dubbing those three series. You can see the full list of what they dubbed and when those episodes were released. They actually released about 10 episodes last week and will release 7 between yesterday and Friday. https://www.funimation.com/blog/2020/04/25/dub-from-home-the-latest-news-on-simuldubs-my-hero-academia-black-clover/ Toonami is indeed rerunning Fire Force ep 15-24 starting next week. It replaces Mob at 1am. One rerun for another. Them’s the breaks. We very well might not see an additional premiere until October unless SAO is ready in time to replace Ballmastrz or Black Clover. I’m really starting to doubt there will be another new show this year aside from FF season 2 and SAO WoU. I’d like to think their budget has enough funds for at least 1-2 more shows that are new to the network but it’s looking increasingly less likely. Black Clover and Shippuden were the only long series they would have had to renew using part of the 2020 budget. 52 episodes of those two, 23 episodes of SAO, 24 episodes of Fire Force, 13 episodes of Paranoia Agent and maybe 13 episodes of Food Wars can’t possibly be all they were able to afford. That’s not much even compared to 2018 much less 2019. But at this point, saving budget for a couple of shows that will start late in 2020 and carry a few months into 2021 would probably be wise. Makes ya wonder how things might have turned out if there wasn’t a global pandemic. MHA would have finished sooner, JoJo would be nearly over, Fire Force season 2 would probably already be airing, Clover would have kept on trucking and SAO would be on soon but what else? They still probably would have crawled back to DBS after MHA ended. Did AT&T screw them badly enough that even without a pandemic they would not have had more than 4-5 premieres right now? It definitely looks that way. AT&T and WarnerMedia and Adult Swim itself have plenty of money but they do not seem to be letting Toonami use very much of it for acquisitions right now. It seems like Toonami’s acquisition budget is getting screwed because it is a much lower priority than original productions, co-pros and acquisitions for other platforms. With 3 million subscribers, Crunchyroll dwarfs Toonami in the revenue department. So they can afford to produce several original series and also license several more anime each season. That said, CR’s pretty lackluster offerings on HBO Max still makes me think they would run a lower quality block than DeMarco usually does.

They really don't need to run 3 episodes of Super every Saturday... give one of those slots to an MHA rerun at least, sheesh. They'll probably just keep Super at 8pm for PGish content right after CN programming but I wonder if they'll end up shifting things around, air comedy from 8pm-11pm and start Toonami at 11pm with an hour of DBS reruns (followed by 6 other shows). They'll probably keep Family Guy in the 11pm hour for now though. I hope no one was looking forward to DBZ KFC. I'm inclined to think they didn't renew The Final Chapters and only renewed up to episode 98. And now they're about to lose Kai. That will leave Super as their only Dragon Ball show and you know what that means... Super is gonna get played a lot.

There's a thread talking about the dub status for Black Clover. Toonami just aired episode 127 and FUNimation is releasing 129 within the next 12 hours. FUNimation has been continuing the dub off and on. If they can dub one episode a week from now on then Black Clover wont need to take a break on Toonami but chances are they wont stay that consistent in the coming months. I think it's a reasonable expectation that Black Clover's dub will air until the end of August on Toonami but in order for that to happen, FUNimation has to dub two more episodes within the next 3 weeks. 132 is where Japan had to take a break (it has since resumed). And yes you can count on a marathon because Fire Force season 2 starts October 24th and they're starting the rerun with episode 15. It would have started at episode 14 if they were airing the regular line-up on the first Saturday in September. So if they're running a marathon on that weekend then it would make for a good clean break for Black Clover if it went on hiatus the week before that. Then I honestly don't know how long they'd have to wait bring Black Clover back for premiere episodes but they should probably give it at least a few months so they don't have to take another break after just a handful of episodes. Also regarding SAO's dub returning in August. I am now thinking the Aniplex rep actually was talking about Alicization's dub finally streaming (somewhere other than Adult Swim's site) in August. I say that because suddenly both FUNimation's site and Hulu are starting to stream the first quarter of Alicization's dub in August. SO that's probably what he was talking about. That said, LA studios are embracing the dubbing from home method so this batch of Alicization will likely be dubbed pretty soon. I still wont rule out the possibility that War of the Underworld could resume on Toonami later in August when Ballmastrz ends or Black Clover has to take a break. But alternatively, I could see new SAO replace JoJo on October 24th. Because it just so happens that JoJo ends the week before Fire Force season 2 starts, so they might be planning to start two shows that night. If SAO doesn't somehow come back sooner then they may as well wait till then.

If it isn’t dubbed sooner. SAO could be back on Oct 24th.

They had about 3 weeks in a row for Black Clover and then after 1 week off they managed 2 weeks in a row (possibly more). The old simuldub schedule forced them to dub one episode a time (most of the time). Having at least two or more to work on at a time results in a rather inconsistent schedule but can also mean they can record actors lines for more than one episode at a time. So while they probably cannot keep up a weekly release every week for a long time, they should be able to dub 2-3 episodes in a four week span rather than strictly 2. And soon they might be able to release one episode a week more consistently. They are clearly prioritizing Clover and I expect FF will see weekly releases again in the coming months.

I'd say that night was quite a success, at least for ratings lately.

Black Clover probably has to take a break in a few weeks. Maybe like JoJo it can return in a decent slot. At this point, they should move Shippuden to 1:30 when BC takes a break, if all they have coming until October is more reruns.

I still theorize we won’t get season 2 until 2 years after it simulcast. That would be early 2021. That’s how long it took to get season 1. Well so much for having 4 premieres in August. FF season 2 will start the week after Golden Wind ends so it’s possible this rerun will move later when Ballmastrz finishes or Clover takes a break.

4th and 5th are better than 3rd IMO. Finally some good news. But... Mob season one still ends this week. Ballmastrz ends two weeks later. Black Clover probably has to take a break the week after that. So hopefully those aren’t all replaced by more reruns. But for now, JoJo returns and gets a great slot. So I’m more or less content.

That would also be of my interest...

Maybe they're hoping to replace it with JoJo but they don't have the tapes yet. Or maybe they have to delay or so by doubling up Super or something. Those are at least two possibilities but neither inspire confidence. So at this point I'm leaning toward "they got nothing" and everything from 1AM-3:30 will just shift up. When Clover runs out of dub episodes or Ballmastrz ends (in 3 more weeks) then JoJo comes back. I look forward to Fena, Uzumaki and Blade Runner: Black Lotus but there is nothing to be excited about right now.

We can certainly hope the "anime more" part of his statement meant promos for things airing in August because I find it pretty unlikely that the announcement he's speaking of isn't another co-production with Crunchyroll. I really don't want to believe they aren't showing a promo for whatever replaces Paranoia Agent because that would just be terribly annoying.

I would find that programming interesting.

Yeah it's probably another Rick & Morty anime short (which DOES NOT come out of Toonami's budget) but we can certainly hope it will be something else. Having most of the shows airing in 35 minute time slots should allow for plenty of time for previews and other goodies.

Check out DECA-DENCE this season. Did you ever look into the new GITS series on Netflix?