Solo Leveling is one of the most popular animes in recent memory, but one thing about the series has been confusing. Why isn’t season 3 confirmed yet? What’s going on there?
All we are getting are hints about the “hopes” for season 3, but with a new update, that appears to be all they are still, hopes.
In a Deadline interview with Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini, which airs the show, he was asked about season 3 plans for Solo Leveling, and his answer is at least somewhat disconcerting:
“We hope so,” Purini said. “The creators want to work on lot of shows. Anime is really popular, so there’s a lot of demand, and so we have to find the right time to get started on the next season.”
It’s unclear why the creators wouldn’t immediately prioritize a new season of Solo Leveling due to its stunning popularity, but nothing seems to be worked out yet, and the fact they they are still in the stage of “figuring out the right time to get started” means that season 3 is apparently nowhere right now, and it will be a wildly larger gap than we saw between seasons 1 and 2. At least 2-3 years from here, it would seem.
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This reluctance extends back a few months which Solo Leveling animation producer Atsuhi Kaneko said that Solo Leveling “may or may not” continue from there, despite an obvious cliffhanger and loads of source material to adapt.
Whatever’s going on here, Solo Leveling has been such a hit that it’s changing the core of Crunchyroll development. Back to Purini and the Deadline interview:
“It definitely makes us want to take more experiments. Ghost of Tsushima is an example. It is a game IP that we know gaming fans love, and that’s one of the reasons we want to bring it to anime; to see if we can recreate that same phenomenon.”
Ghost of Tsushima is the critically-acclaimed Sony video game that has a sequel out, Ghost of Yotei, in October of this year. Many video game animated series have found themselves performing extremely well, but mostly over on Netflix, from Arcane to Cyberpunk: Edgerunners to Castlevania. Though I think expecting a Ghost of Tsushima anime to come close to something like Solo Leveling will not be realistic.
It really is not clear about why Solo Leveling season 3 feels this up in the air. Even juggling projects, even with anime development taking a while, this show is so big it should be a priority for everyone over everything else. Hopefully we’ll get some actually good news soon, but like season 3, that may too be far away.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
