MAPPA's Ranma ½ remake finally has a date. At the series' Dota-Bata Martial Arts Fan Meeting on 25 July 2026, the team confirmed season 3 will premiere on 3 October — and unveiled a new key visual plus five additions to an already stacked cast.
The premiere details
Season 3 starts on Saturday 3 October 2026 at 24:55 JST on Nippon TV — effectively the small hours of Sunday morning in Japan — with each episode streaming exclusively on Netflix worldwide straight after broadcast. Konosuke Uda returns to direct at MAPPA, with Kimiko Ueno on series composition, Hiromi Taniguchi on character design, and Kaoru Wada composing the music. Main animator Masahiro Kurio is back too, joined by newcomers Atsuko Ishida and Blue Box's Yoshihiro Takeda.
The new cast — two absolute legends included
- Masako Nozawa — the voice of Dragon Ball's Goku — plays the Grand Master, head of the Daimonji-ryu school of martial-arts tea ceremony.
- Jun Fukuyama — plays Sentaro Daimonji, the school's heir.
- Minami Tanaka — plays Tsubasa Kurenai, Ukyo's costume-obsessed former classmate.
- Mayumi Tanaka — One Piece's Luffy — takes a deliberately undisclosed role.
- Saori Hayami — also cast in a secret role, teased only in the new key visual.
Two mystery characters, voiced by two of the most famous performers in anime. Rumiko Takahashi's team clearly knows how to keep people guessing until October.
Where the remake stands
Season 1 premiered in October 2024, season 2 followed in October 2025, and season 3 was green-lit in March 2026. Like clockwork. The remake adapts Takahashi's manga — serialised in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1987 to 1996 across 38 volumes — about a martial artist who turns into a girl whenever he's splashed with cold water. Studio Deen's original adaptation ran 161 episodes from 1989 to 1992, so MAPPA's version still has years of material ahead of it.
For the record: with Nozawa and Tanaka on board, Goku and Luffy are now officially in the Tendo dojo's orbit. October can't come soon enough.