Tokyo Ghoul, a two-part manga by Sui Ishida, has been turned into a well-liked anime series. Despite receiving mixed reviews, the series is regarded as one of the best in the seinen subgenre of contemporary anime. Tokyo Ghoul’s tale was divided into two parts: Tokyo Ghoul and Tokyo Ghoul:re. The anime adapted half of the first section (Ishida rewrote the second part into Tokyo Ghoul A), and the second part was adapted from the manga (although with a lot of left-out segments). The manga and anime both came to an end in 2018. We’ll talk about the prospect of a Tokyo Ghoul remake because the original is still widely watched today.
Regarding the Tokyo Ghoul remake, there is still no official information available. Although the anime adaptation of Tokyo Ghoul deviated significantly from the manga and omitted many manga-specific aspects, it faithfully reproduced the whole plot. Despite internet fan demand, the company that created the anime version, Studio Pierrot, still controls the rights to the series and has not provided any information about a potential remake.
The Tokyo Ghoul anime series was produced, and we’ll discuss the likelihood of a remake in the remaining sections of this article. While there won’t be any spoilers, we will quickly summarise the series so you can skip that section if you don’t want to know what occurs. You will find all the information you need in this article.
Table of Contents
Will a new Tokyo Ghoul be released?
Tokyo Ghoul first appeared in Weekly Young Jump magazine on September 8, 2011. Sui Ishida is the creator of the series, and Sheisha released the first collected book on February 17, 2012. Release day for the last chapter was September 18, 2014. There were 14 volumes in the entire series. The series is licenced by VIZ Media for North America.
The follow-up, Tokyo Ghoul:re, made its premiere in the same magazine on October 16, 2014. After a small time jump, the tale continued the plot while introducing new characters. The series would end in the following three chapters, the last of which was published on July 5, 2018, in the magazine’s 31st edition, according to a significant announcement made on June 14, 2018, in the publication’s 28th issue of the year. There are 16 books left in the series.
Between August and September 2013, a Tokyo Ghoul [Jack] spin-off series that detailed the encounter between the two inspectors, Kisho Arima and Taishi Fura, when they were still in high school, twelve years before the main tale, ran in the online edition magazine Jump Live. On October 18, 2013, it was then advertised as an electronic book.
When the tenth volume of the manga was published in January 2014, an anime television series adaptation was announced. It will debut on July 4, 2014, and is produced by the Pierrot studio with Shuhei Morita directing from a Chji Mikasano screenplay. Between September and December 2014, the twelve episodes were distributed in four DVD and Blu-ray box sets. The Weekly Young Jump magazine’s 46th issue had a second season announcement.
This season featured an unpublished story directed by Sui Ishida that was actually a different interpretation of the Tokyo Ghoul manga’s conclusion. Twelve episodes, titled Tokyo Ghoul A, were broadcast between January 8 and March 26, 2015. Marvelous revealed plans for an anime version of Tokyo Ghoul:re in 2018 and the return of Natsuki Hanae for the dubbing of Haise Sasaki through the launch of a website in October 2015.
Chji Mikasano retained his position as the screenwriter, and Atsuko Nakajima replaced Kazuhiro Miwa as the main character designer. The main staff for this adaptation was revealed in the 49th issue of 2017’s Young Jump. Odahiro Watanabe replaced Shuhei Morita as the series’ director at the Pierrot animation studio, whose Pierrot+ studio is also accredited with animation production assistance.
Tokyo Ghoul:re was split into two parts, the first of which had twelve episodes and debuted on Tokyo MX, SUN, TVA, TVQ, and BS11 in Japan between April 3 and June 19, 2018. The second portion, which included twelve episodes as well, aired from October 9 to December 25, 2018. On September 30, 2015, an original video animation adapting the spin-off series Tokyo Ghoul [Jack] was made available. On December 25, 2015, Tokyo Ghoul: Pinto, a second OVA, was made available. It is an adaptation of the third tale from Tokyo Ghoul: Hibi, which tells the tale of the encounter between Shu Tsukiyama and Chie Hori.
We have now completed our tour of Tokyo Ghoul’s production history. All of this demonstrates that the series is unquestionably over and has been since 2018. The anime’s last season, despite being a little hurried and chaotic as well, managed to adapt the entire plot and its canon ending. Ishida himself admitted that he rushed the ending because he was getting tired of the story. We have no information on a potential sequel because Ishida has not since made any allusions to returning to this realm.
The issue is the same as far as the remake is concerned. Even though the world is now experiencing a remake mania, and anime is certainly no exception, Tokyo Ghoul doesn’t seem like a good contender for a remake. The series is still rather new, so it would be highly rare for Pierrot, who still owns the rights to it, to decide to start from scratch just five years after the first one concluded. Sure, we’ve seen Trigun remakes, Bleach revivals, and the recent return of Digimon after a protracted absence, but those aren’t the ideal comparisons.
Trigun, a 90s classic, only has a tiny number of canon episodes, therefore at the time, it was not a direct adaptation. Digimon is a franchise that may be continued, rebooted, or rebuilt at any moment, mostly because there is no manga to adapt as it is an original anime series. Bleach just picked up where it left off. Tokyo Ghoul, on the other hand, only included new animations and perhaps an enlarged narrative with more images, so it wouldn’t have anything fresh to give viewers.
Sure, the story of Tokyo Ghoul A was entirely different from the one depicted in the manga, but there are two issues with that. Due to the fact that less than 25% of the content was manga canon and even that was overseen and written by Ishida himself, it was the author’s choice and wouldn’t be very practical to rebuild the entire series at this point in the tale. Second, even though Tokyo Ghoul A significantly deviates from the original manga, it still came to the same conclusion, finishing roughly in the same way; they just took a different route.
You might certainly argue that Fullmetal Alchemist and Brotherhood involved a comparable situation, but that was in a different era. There were many filler episodes back then, and anime series were shown on a weekly basis for a longer period of time. There were also few long gaps between episodes. Because of this, some popular series had more than 300 episodes overall, with some broadcasting more than 50 episodes at once. Digimon Ghost Game is a rare exception, but the Digimon series has a tradition and is regarded as children’s programming. This is not the case today, even with popular anime titles.
Tokyo Ghoul is unlikely to receive the Fullmetal Alchemist treatment because of this. Additionally, you shouldn’t forget that Hiromu Arakawa did not write the original Fullmetal Alchemist series, which had an entirely original tale. In particular, Arakawa authorised the producers to develop their own alternate take on the future of the series, giving them merely hints because the animation was too similar to the manga. Because Ishida wrote Tokyo Ghoul A, although Arakawa did not write the tale, it is so different. Brotherhood provided a completely different story, one that had been created by the original author, and for that reason it made sense. We would simply have a separate plot created by the same author for Tokyo Ghoul.
Despite this, we continue to believe that Tokyo Ghoul merits a remake, but it won’t happen any time soon. If the series continues to be popular enough to warrant a remake in the distant future, it might happen in 5–10 years based on the progression. To be specific, Tokyo Ghoul merits some justice. The individuals and their tales were, for the most part, incredibly intriguing, and the show featured sorrow and heroism in equal measure.
The manga was messed up by Ishida, who was able to keep the overall idea of a decent ending, but the anime was even worse, while being watchable. We all remember how:re actually referenced the original manga’s plot, disregarding the fact that Tokyo Ghoul A told things differently. What it deserves is a coherent story with no plotholes and major inconsistencies, better animation, and more of Kaneki’s innate tragedy, regardless of how dark, painful, and twisted it is. Tokyo Ghoul is a legitimate seinen title that merits a seinen adaptation.
But as we’ve already stated, it won’t be happening right now. Since they own the rights, neither MAPPA nor ufotable can adapt the series, and Pierrot doesn’t appear to have any immediate intentions to do so. Since Tokyo Ghoul is still relatively new and Pierrot is now preoccupied with other series, it is undoubtedly not a top priority for them. A remake or relaunch of the series, however, won’t seem unusual if fans continue to demand it and bring up Tokyo Ghoul over the course of the following couple of years, and there is a good chance that Pierrot will finally do honour to one of the best stories in recent memory.
