It is already April 11 in Japan, so three years have passed since the premiere of the anime adaptation of the light novels of Asato Asato“86: Eighty-Six“. Although the story captivated viewers from its first episode, to date there has been no news about the production of any continuation. In fact, although there is a lot of material available to adapt in the original light novels, the reasons why a continuation might not be produced would rather go towards planning issues.
When “86: Eighty-Six” premiered its anime adaptation in Spring-2021 (April-June)was announced as a two-part series, with the second scheduled for the season of Fall-2021 (October-December). But it was in this second part where the problems began on the part of A-1 Picturesthe studio in charge of the adaptation.
In fact, the anime adaptation was originally scheduled to premiere in 2020, but was delayed due to production issues. Then, during the second part, “86: Eighty-Six” went through numerous suspensions due to production problems, which caused them to “run out of time on television.” To explain this, it turns out that the series aired its “Episode 21” on December 26, 2021, so they could no longer broadcast the remaining two episodes during the two weeks following that date, because they were already going to interfere with the premieres of Winter-2022 (January-March).
This caused these two final episodes to be delayed until March 2022, and although they were much better in terms of quality (of course, the studio had an extra three months to complete the work), many had already left “86: Eighty-Six” in the past taking into account that the new season brought “Kimetsu no Yaiba”, “Shingeki no Kyojin”, and “Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru”, to name a few.
Anyway, the only season so far of “86: Eighty-Six” adapted Volume 1 and part of Volume 2 in the first part, while the second part finished adapting the events of Volume 2 and also Volume 3 in its entirety. As we already mentioned, there is enough content for a second season, since there are a total of thirteen volumes published to date.
While there is plenty of material, perhaps the same cannot be said for A-1 Pictures’ availability for this project. Having the massive project of “Solo Leveling”, in addition to other franchises such as “Sword Art Online”, “NieR: Automata” and the eventual return of “Kaguya-sama: Love is War”, It certainly seems difficult for them to make time to produce a sequel to “86: Eighty-Six”which although it was well received by specialized critics, Blu-ray/DVD sales (the only financial aspect of a public nature) were average.
Will this franchise return in the future? We just have to wait.
