A short season is honestly disappointing.
Summary:
- The Hashira Training arc of Demon Slayer has just enough episodes to be a movie instead of a short TV series.
- It would be successful as a movie, but it might not be good for the future of the series.
- The arc is smaller in scale, but a couple of anime-original scenes would’ve turned it into a great movie.
The episode count of the Hashira Training arc of Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba) is a huge point of speculation among fans of the series. The common consensus is that it will be 6 or 7 episodes long — based on its air date.
The amount of chapters is just right
The season being so short is actually understandable. This arc is very short in the manga — only 9 chapters long. For comparison, the Mugen Train arc was 13 chapters long. That was covered by a 2-hour movie, and later by 6 episodes of TV anime (the first episode of Mugen Train TV series is anime-original).
This, however, makes fans wonder — if that arc was turned into the movie first, why couldn’t the same happen to the Hashira Training arc? Yes, we did get a movie for it, but it’s a recap of the events of the last season with just some new content — not a proper movie for the entire arc like Mugen Train was.
Why not turn it into a movie?
The theoretical movie for the Hashira Training arc was about an hour and a half long. This is actually better than Mugen Train’s runtime of two hours: if there was one complaint about it, it was about it being too long.
It also would definitely be profitable for the studio to turn the arc into a movie. After all, the Mugen Train movie broke multiple records both in Japan and overseas. Another movie for Demon Slayer that isn’t just a recap/preview would make a lot of money.
However, releasing the Hashira Training arc can potentially create issues for the franchise in the future. Movies can kill the momentum of the series, as many fans wouldn’t be able to watch them until an online release.
In the case of very successful movies like Mugen Train, the online release may not come until more than a year later. That said, ufotable could readapt it into a TV series as well.
Does the arc have good content for a movie?
There are also concerns about the Hashira Training arc being even suited for movie format due to its content. Essentially, it’s a smaller arc which serves as a breather for the final part of the manga. An arc focused on training just doesn’t make for an interesting movie, but watching it weekly wouldn’t be as bad.
That said, it’s not like it would be a complete failure. And also, since the Mugen Train TV could add some original content, why couldn’t the Hashira Training do the same? A training arc with some anime-only hype fight scenes would’ve been a great movie