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When an anime is as big as Solo Leveling has been for the past two years, you’d expect the studio to want to keep that hype train going. After it managed to receive more reviews on Crunchyroll than One Piece, it is clear that fans are excited for a potential season three of the show. And yet, A-1 Pictures hasn’t confirmed a third season of Solo Leveling is even in production, let alone given us a potential release date. So, what exactly is the hold-up?

The impatience is somewhat justified; season two of Solo Leveling was confirmed as soon as season one ended, so we all expected a similar announcement to happen at the end of March. Here we are, a month and a half later and still waiting. It isn’t that the team behind the anime isn’t eager to get to work on more episodes – during a Reddit AMA, they encouraged fans to be as vocal as possible in their support for a third season.

“If we’re going to make a season 3, it’s going to take all the support and energy from the fans,” Sota Furuhashi (producer at Aniplex) and Atsushi Kaneko (animation producer at A-1 Pictures) explained.

Kaneko has also said in an Aniplex After Hours interview that he hopes the break will be temporary.

“With Episode 25… the TV anime series Solo Leveling will come to an end for now. Will this end be temporary or not? I honestly don’t know what the future will bring.”

Which is a bit more ambiguous than I think most fans were hoping for.

No show gets made without an audience to watch it, but there is already a clear demand for more Solo Leveling. It was Crunchyroll’s top series during the Winter 2025 anime season. Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini said he hoped that more Solo Leveling was on the way, saying that the series creators “want to work on a 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 is worth mentioning here that A-1 Pictures, the studio that makes Solo Leveling, is owned by Aniplex, who is, in turn, owned by Sony Music Entertainment Japan. Sony also owns Crunchyroll, hence why the streaming service seems more involved in production decisions. It is all part of Sony’s plan to take over the anime industry.

There is a hint in Purini’s comment about the likely reason for the delay Solo Leveling season 3. A-1 Pictures is very busy and key members of the team are likely looking at other projects before they tackle the next story arc of Solo Leveling. How long that takes is impossible to know until they say one way or another. For example, there are unsubstantiated rumors that series director Shunsuke Nakashige is working on another anime series before he returns to Solo Leveling. After working on the show pretty consistently for several years, it wouldn't surprise us if he and others needed something else to work on.

So, is Solo Leveling going to be back for season three? There hasn’t been any official confirmation one way or another, but we would be shocked if they let this celebrated and profitable title slip by the wayside. There is clearly going to be a delay before the next season, but late 2026 or early 2027 feels like a likely release window for the team.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Why the finales of My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and One Piece feel like the end of an era in manga
• Why is One Piece more popular now that the anime is 25 years old? We asked around and found out
• Dan Da Dan is weird, profoundly inappropriate, and the perfect anime this season
• Why One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy is the perfect anime hero for the dark times ahead
• 40 years after its debut, Dragon Ball is a pop culture force like few others
• Dan Da Dan's most emotionally devastating sequence proves that sometimes words aren't necessary
• Gnosia, the "Among Us meets Everything Everywhere All at Once" visual novel is getting an anime adaptation that needs to be as weird as possible
• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
• Sony is making big moves to own the anime industry by buying Kadokawa, publisher of Oshi no Ko, Sword Art Online, and Konosuba
• 2025 is the year One Punch Man season 3 finally adapts the cosmically weird Monster Association Arc and I can't wait