Why did the Bleach anime end in 2012?

Studio Pierrot's adaptation, directed by Noriyuki Abe and broadcast on TV Tokyo, ran for 366 episodes from October 5, 2004 to March 27, 2012. Anime News Network reported the end date on February 23, 2012, while the final season was still airing. The series was a long runner by any standard: eight years, sixteen seasons, four films alongside it.

The sixteenth and final season adapted the Lost Agent arc, volumes 49 to 54 of the manga, and aired from October 11, 2011 to March 27, 2012. Its last episode, episode 366, closes that arc completely: Ichigo's powers restored, the Fullbring conflict resolved. As a broadcast ending it is tidy. What it is not is the end of the story, because the manga's final arc, the Thousand-Year Blood War, had begun serialization on February 13, 2012, roughly six weeks before the anime stopped. At the moment the anime ended, almost none of the final arc existed to adapt.

The manga itself ran four more years, ending on August 22, 2016 with chapter 686. For the rest of the decade there was no announced anime continuation, and the story existed in full only in print, in 74 volumes. Claims that the 2012 ending was a ratings cancellation, or a punishment, or a scheduling accident, are not supported by any statement in the record opened for this page. The verifiable facts are the stopping point and the calendar, and both point the same way: the anime stopped where the finished manga stopped.

In March 2020, as part of the Bleach 20th Anniversary Project, it was announced that the remainder of the manga, beginning with the Thousand-Year Blood War arc, would receive an anime adaptation. A first teaser and the principal staff were unveiled at Jump Festa in December 2021: Studio Pierrot again, Tomohisa Taguchi directing, Masashi Kudo returning as character designer, Shiro Sagisu returning to compose, and Tite Kubo credited as general supervisor. The series premiered on TV Tokyo on October 11, 2022, a decade after the original run ended, and ran in four cours totaling 50 episodes, completing in October 2026. Unlike the original run, it was produced with the manga already finished, and with Kubo supervising new material, including an original battle in the second cours for which he supplied the staff with pages of his own illustrations of a fight he had been unable to depict in the manga.