One Piece is going through one of the biggest changes in its history this week. The 1155th episode of the animation will be broadcast on December 28, and there will be no new episodes until April next year. This marks the official end of the traditional non-stop weekly update model of "One Piece", and Toei Animation will make seasonal adjustments to it.
The news that the broadcast format of "One Piece" is about to be completely revised has actually been announced for a long time, and the node of this change is finally around the corner. Fans who have been accustomed to watching new episodes every week for the past 26 years (yes, 26 years) are about to experience a big impact on their movie-watching habits.
Episode 1155 will be broadcast on December 28, officially bringing the Egghead Island chapter of "One Piece" to an end. The Egghead Island chapter can be called one of the most impactful and influential chapters in the history of animation. This ending arrangement must be to allow fans to wait for the return of the animation with strong expectations for the subsequent plot when the update is suspended for the first time.
There is also good news for fans who are used to catching up on "One Piece" every week: we already know when the new content equivalent of the anime's "second season" will return. A new chapter of the animation will open on April 5, 2026, when new episodes will be broadcast for 13 consecutive weeks; after that, there will be a three-month hiatus, and then the second half of the season will be broadcast, including another 13 episodes.
This means that the number of episodes broadcast per year of "One Piece" will be reduced to 26 episodes in the future, instead of the more than 40 episodes in the past. However, compared with the update pace of other series, I think 26 episodes is actually quite enough. The final season of "Stranger Things" is currently airing, and the show has stretched its storyline so much that its child stars are now adults and even have children of their own.
"One Piece" fans are worried about the future plot rhythm, and this concern is actually reasonable. On the surface, with fewer episodes aired each year, the pace of story chapters will undoubtedly slow down significantly. But fans also expect that the narrative rhythm of the animation will become more compact as a result. Even hard-core fans of "One Piece" have to admit that during the 26-year continuous serialization process, the animation was filled with a large number of original filler plots.
2026 is destined to be an extraordinary year for the "One Piece" series. This year, not only will the broadcast format of animations undergo a subversive change in seasonal broadcasting, but the second season of the adapted version of the live-action drama will also meet the audience. However, fans of the live-action drama may have to be mentally prepared, because the second season will have fewer episodes - only 8 episodes in the entire season, and it will be a full three years after the first season was aired.