Bleach is a long-running shonen manga franchise that first launched in 2001 and concluded in 2016 with 74 total manga volumes to its name. Bleach also earned its place in Shonen Jump's "big three" of its generation alongside Naruto and One Piece. Each series has an impressively lengthy anime to their names, and while Bleach can't match One Piece's epic length, it's still a hefty series to get into.
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It's true that the Bleach anime, as it stands now, does not tell the entire story of the original manga, but even then, dedicated fans would want to know just how much time they'd need to watch the entire thing -- and when the Thousand-Year Blood War arc gets animated, they can factor that in too. Alternatively, fans can calculate how long they'd need to read the original manga if they want the full story right away.
How Long To Watch The Bleach Anime?
The Bleach anime launched in 2004 and ran for eight years before it ended in March 2012, with 366 total episodes, including all filler arcs and episodes. This anime begins with the Substitute Soul Reaper story arc and keeps going through the Xcution arc, ending before the TYBW story arc begins. It also includes complete filler story arcs along the way, most notably the Bount story arc and the zanpakuto rebellion story arc.
Someone who wants to watch the entire Bleach anime, filler and all, has many hours of content ahead of them. If each episode is rounded to 22 minutes, that adds up to just over 134 hours of material, which is just over five and a half days solid. No one would watch 134 hours of anything in a row like that, but they could treat watching Bleach as a job, spending about eight hours per day watching the show. If that person watched roughly eight hours of Bleach per day, every day, they would need 16 days and a partial 17th day to watch the entire thing. While that's quite impressive, some long-running series would require even more time.
If a Bleach viewer just wanted the original story, they could cut out all filler episodes, of which there are 164 in total. That leaves 202 episodes, and if a fan watched them for about eight hours a day, viewing the filler-free run of Bleach would take nine days and a partial 10th day.
The Bleach Manga & Thousand-Year Blood War Arc
Of course, a truly dedicated Bleach fan wouldn't be satisfied with just watching the filler-free run of the series, since they still have the Thousand-Year Blood War arc left to go, which is slated to get an anime adaptation in the near future. Based on that arc's length in the manga and the current anime's length, the Thousand-Year Blood War arc could easily take 50 to 75 episodes to animate, assuming no material from the original manga is cut or combined to shorten the runtime.
If that story arc ends up being 75 episodes long with no fillers, the entire filler-free Bleach run becomes 277 episodes, and someone watching the story of Bleach from the beginning to the very end would need 12 days and a partial 13th to view the entire story in daily eight-hour sequences. However, this is with a conservative 75-episode estimate -- it's possible the TYBW arc could end up being 100+ episodes without filler, meaning that watching the entire anime would be even more of a slog.
For now, someone wanting to experience the entire story of Bleach right away is best off with the manga, especially since reading the series is much faster than watching it, even if all filler episodes are cut. Even if the manga has more material, a fan could get through it all more efficiently, and if they read eight volumes per day, they'll just need nine days and about two hours on the 10th day to read the entire saga. That would take about as long as watching the filler-free anime. However, in exchange, the reader gets the entire story, not just a partial version, and many Bleach fans may agree that the manga is the better experience overall, since it also features excellent art and lacks the dated visuals of 2000s-era anime.
