Dragon Ball Super: Beerus premieres as the third animated telling of the same story

Dragon Ball Super: Beerus premiered on Sunday, October 11, with a Crunchyroll simulcast worldwide. It is a new version of a story Dragon Ball fans already know well, and Crunchyroll is now streaming the same story twice.

Siliconera, reporting Toei Animation's release-date announcement, noted that the original take on this storyline is already streaming on Crunchyroll and is even out on Blu-ray. The new one sits next to it. Netflix will carry it too: in the US, weekly episodes arrive on Netflix from October 17, six days after each Japanese broadcast and Crunchyroll simulcast.

The fourth telling, or the third?

What's on Netflix calls this "our fourth go-around with Lord Beerus". Its count goes like this:

• 2013: the film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods introduces Beerus, the God of Destruction. It was the first Dragon Ball film in 18 years, since Wrath of the Dragon in 1995, and it started a franchise revival.
• 2015: the Dragon Ball Super TV series begins by adapting Battle of Gods and Resurrection 'F'. Its early animation was widely criticised.
• The manga: Dragon Ball Super's manga also opens with the Battle of Gods arc.
• 2026: Dragon Ball Super: Beerus.

That is four versions if you count the manga. On screen, it is the third animated telling of the same arrival, after the 2013 film and the 2015 series. The difference matters for anyone deciding whether to watch: this is not new story material. It is a retelling, with new animation, of the episodes whose original animation drew the most criticism.

What it covers

The official synopsis sets the series a few years after the battle with Majin Buu. Beerus wakes from a decades-long sleep after a prophetic dream about a legendary warrior called the Super Saiyan God. With his attendant Whis, he searches the universe for the remaining Saiyans, finds Goku and Vegeta on Earth, and threatens to destroy the planet unless his challenge is answered.

It won't stop there. According to What's on Netflix, the remake will also give new animation to the Resurrection 'F' arc and the Universe 6 arc.

The Universe 6 arc is where the original series moved past the material taken from the films. Champa, the God of Destruction of Universe 6 and Beerus's twin brother, proposes a tournament between fighters from his universe and Goku's Universe 7.

The story behind the story

The original Dragon Ball Super anime, produced by Toei Animation, aired on Fuji TV from July 2015 to March 2018. Akira Toriyama's plot also became a manga, serialised in Shueisha's monthly V Jump from June 2015. That manga is now on hiatus following Toriyama's death in March 2024.

So the franchise is in an odd position. The comic that continued the story has stopped. The anime is going back to its own beginning and drawing it again. Battle of Gods had ended an 18-year gap between Dragon Ball films, a stretch in which, as What's on Netflix puts it, fans got by on video games and a beloved YouTube parody. Beerus now arrives as a remake while the story itself is paused.

Who's in it, and where to watch

• Voices: Masako Nozawa as Goku and Koichi Yamadera as Beerus.
• English: subtitles from day one. No English dub had been announced as of Toei's release-date news.
• Crunchyroll: worldwide from October 11, as a simulcast with the Japanese broadcast.
• Netflix US: weekly from October 17, six days behind Japan. Netflix used the same schedule for Dragon Ball Daima and for One Piece's weekly rollout.
• Studio: Toei Animation.

A launch campaign on trucks, trains and buses

Toei backed the premiere with a physical ad campaign on two continents. In Japan, wrapped trucks drove through Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo and Fukuoka between October 5 and October 11, and train stations carried ads. In the US, buses in Los Angeles and New York were decked out in the show's designs, and Toei said 30 malls would feature ads. Only the Japanese dates were fixed in the announcement.

That is a lot of outdoor advertising for a story that most of its target audience has already seen, at least once. The scale of the campaign suggests Toei is aiming beyond the fans who already know the story.

What is still unknown

• The episode count. Neither Toei's announcement nor the Netflix news gives one.
• An English dub. None had been announced as of the release-date news.
• Where it ends. The Universe 6 arc is the last one confirmed. Nothing beyond it has been mentioned.

Beerus first appeared in a film in 2013. A TV series retold the story two years later, and the manga told it again. In 2026, it is back with new animation, on the same service that already streams the old version.