MAPPA did not bring a trailer to Juju Fes this weekend. It brought one picture, and the picture was enough. The fifth anniversary event for the “Jujutsu Kaisen” anime unveiled the first teaser visual for season 4, and it is Ryomen Sukuna (Junichi Suwabe) submerged in black water, staring straight out of the frame, one hand reaching toward whoever is looking at him. No fire, no skulls, no anniversary confetti. Just the King of Curses underwater in the dark, coming for you specifically.
The line printed alongside him does the rest of the work: “Do you remember? I told you that you’d see something interesting.” That is a callback, and if it landed in your stomach rather than your head, you have read far enough to know why. Sukuna has spent a long stretch of this story as a voice in someone else’s body, a background threat with excellent comic timing. The visual is MAPPA announcing that period is over. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Jujutsu Kaisen” through the end of season 3 and the Culling Game arc.
Just the King of Curses underwater in the dark, coming for you specifically.”
Let us be precise about what did and did not happen this weekend, because a lot of coverage is blurring two separate reveals together. Juju Fes produced the still image and the tagline. It did not produce new footage. The teaser trailer currently doing the rounds is from June 19, when MAPPA ran its fifteenth anniversary lineup stream, and that clip showed Hakari against Kashimo in a genuinely unhinged brawl, Yuki Tsukumo and Choso squaring up to Kenjaku, and quick looks at Yuji Itadori (Junya Enoki), Megumi Fushiguro (Yuma Uchida) and Maki Zenin. If you went looking for fresh animation off the back of this weekend’s headlines and came up empty, that is why.
Season 4 adapts The Culling Game Part 2, picking up from where season 3’s twelve episode run left off in March. That finale ran an extended twenty seven minutes and centred on Yuta Okkotsu clearing house in the Sendai Colony against Dhruv Lakdawalla, Takako Uro and Ryu Ishigori, delivering the anime’s first proper look at Sukuna’s true form and the first time three Domain Expansions fired simultaneously on screen. It also left Megumi in a place that anyone who has read ahead will describe with a long pause and a change of subject. The season ended on a win that did not feel like one.
There is a real change behind the camera worth understanding, and it has been widely misreported thanks to an unfortunate coincidence of names. Season 4’s director is Takeru Sato, who served as assistant director on season 3 and has been promoted into the chair. He is not Takeru Satoh, the live action actor from the “Rurouni Kenshin” films, and if you have seen a headline this week implying a famous actor is now directing “Jujutsu Kaisen”, that is where it came from. Shota Goshozono, who directed season 3, moves up to chief director rather than leaving. Hiroshi Seko stays on series composition and Yoshimasa Terui stays on music, so the spine of the production is intact.
Sato has said very little, and what he has said sounds like a man aware of what he has been handed. “While carrying forward the expressions and possibilities that Jujutsu Kaisen has cultivated over the years, I will devote myself to bringing the series’ appeal to life through animation in the best possible way,” he offered, adding that he feels “the weight of the responsibility of being entrusted with such an important title every day.” Reasonable, given the room he is walking into. The Shibuya Incident arc in season 2 is still cited as one of the best looking shonen adaptations anyone has produced, and it is also the arc during which MAPPA animators went public about brutal schedules and denied delays. A new director inheriting that standard and that reputation at once is not a small ask. The reporting at the time was specific, and it came from the animators themselves rather than from anonymous sources: six and seven day weeks, days running past twelve hours, and a request to push the schedule that the production committee turned down. Several of the visible dips in season 2’s animation were attributed directly to that crunch. None of it is Sato’s doing and none of it gets fixed by promoting him, but it is the room every announcement about this show now lands in.
The manga finished in September 2024, ending at chapter 271 after six and a half years and more than a hundred million copies in circulation. The anime has adapted somewhere around chapter 181. That gap is the whole story of the next few years: roughly ninety chapters of material remain, and they contain the sequence the entire fandom has been bracing for since the anime started. We are not going to name it here, and if you are anime only we would encourage you to stay off the tags around season 4’s premiere, because this is the arc where being spoiled genuinely ruins something. It is also worth saying plainly that ninety chapters is not one season of television. Season 3 spent twelve episodes covering a fraction of the Culling Game, so anyone expecting season 4 to carry the story all the way to the manga’s ending is going to be disappointed on arithmetic alone.
What is still missing is everything practical. No premiere date has been announced, no episode count, and no formal season 4 cast confirmation, though there is no reason to expect changes to a voice cast that includes Suwabe, Enoki, Uchida, Asami Seto as Nobara Kugisaki and Yuichi Nakamura as Satoru Gojo. Crunchyroll has carried the series outside Asia through three seasons and the “Jujutsu Kaisen 0” film. Any date you see attached to season 4 right now, including the 2027 windows floating around aggregator posts, is somebody guessing. The visual is the news. Everything else is patience.
What Do You Think? Is a single still image a fair thing to build a weekend of anticipation on, or should a fifth anniversary event have brought actual footage? Does Takeru Sato inherit a poisoned chalice following the Shibuya Incident’s animation standard, or is a fresh director exactly what this adaptation needs? And after three seasons of Sukuna working through other people, are you ready for the version of him that is finally doing it himself?
Catch up properly: every Jujutsu Kaisen episode and film in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Jujutsu Kaisen timeline.
See you on the next binge!
