Black Clover Anime Says Goodbye?

I have to admit, when Studio Pierrot announced earlier this week that Black Clover would be ending on March 30th, my heart immediately dropped. The adventures of Asta and friends have become such an important part of my weekly anime experience. I often put Black Clover up there right below One Piece and Bleach as my favorite. (To be honest, I often do expound upon the fact that I believe that Black Clover is superior to Bleach in pacing, world building, development, etc. but that is an article for another time.)

So yes, at first I was very down, but as I re read the statement and thought a little more deeply about this decision, I realized that perhaps it's not that bad of a decision at all, and will overall benefit the anime in many ways.

The actual statement made by the studio was that the anime will be ending after Episode 170 which will air on March 30th. This is after 3 and 1/2 years of running. Also, on that day the studio would be making a special announcement concerning the show.

Why is Black Clover Ending?

I believe that Black Clover will be taking off for awhile to allow Yuki Tabata time to continue the manga and put out some more content. Many anime run into this problem during their airing, where they get caught up to the creator. They have a couple of options when this happens.

One is to continue to work on the anime, and produce filler episodes, giving the mangaka time to write and create more content. Black Clover recently went through a smaller arc of filler content that took place right before the Spade Kingdom arc. Most anime fans do not care for this filler content, it's nice to have some more of your favorite show coming out, but when none of it truly matters to the story, whats really the point? In Black Clover's defense, some of the filler they recently produced wasn't half bad, but I still found myself hoping each week that it would be time to finally get back to the story.

Another option is to stall the anime for awhile, also allowing the mangaka to continue to write and create content. Then the studio can return to the anime later when there a couple more arcs worth of story ready to be turned into anime. This cuts down on bad filler, and gives the writer more time to work on his story without imposing extra stress on him. Personally, I think this is the direction that Studio Pierrot is headed.

I do not see Yuki Tabata halting the manga anytime soon, especially since last year he expressed desire that Black Clover would continue to grow and expand into a story and world that was massive like One Piece. If that's true he has a pretty long way to go, but I believe in him, I often relate many of the character development stories and deep lore building seen in Black Clover to the sort of stuff you see in Oda-san's work.

What About the Special Announcement?

Gonna take a pretty well educated guess here (and this seems to be the idea across most of the anime community) that we will get a Black Clover movie announcement. Which I am totally on board with, there hasn't been one yet in the shows run, and I'm very excited to see Asta and Co. on the big screen. Some of the battles in the second half of the anime are already jaw droppingly beautiful, I just imagine watching something like that on a theater screen and it gets me so excited.

I would guess that it would not be a canon movie (that's pretty rare in anime runs, although Demon Slayer recently did it with Mugen Train), especially since Yuki Tabata is still working on the current Spade Kingdom Arc, and there's not much content to work with.

So let's continue to hope these guesses are right. We can say goodbye to Black Clover for a bit, watch a (hopefully) amazing movie, and then return to the story later after the manga has progressed. I just don't see this being the end for Black Clover's animated adventures.