Chainsaw Man Manga is Ending, After a Seven Year Run

Tatsuki Fujimoto gave his readers roughly 24 hours of warning. A note at the end of Chapter 231, published on March 10 on Shueisha's Jump+ platform, confirmed that Chainsaw Man Part 2 will end with the next installment. Chapter 232 drops on March 24. That is two weeks away, and the fanbase, to put it mildly, was not ready.

Chainsaw Man began serialisation in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in December 2018. Part 1 ran for 97 chapters before ending in December 2020. Part 2, subtitled the Academy Saga, launched on Jump+ in July 2022 and has run for 134 chapters on a bi-weekly schedule. Together, the two arcs span just over seven years of publication and 23 collected volumes. Sales crossed 35 million copies in circulation by January 2026, placing it among the best-selling manga of all time.

Spoiler warning: the following contains plot details from Chapter 231 and beyond the Reze Arc.

The chapter itself did little to ease the shock. Titled "Goodbye, Pochita," it opens inside Denji's mind, where his companion, the Chainsaw Devil, informs him that they have been devoured by another devil. Pochita then tears out his own heart and consumes it, erasing himself from existence. The final panel shows the rundown shack where Denji once lived, a quiet image that loops the story back to its very first pages. It read like a eulogy.

The abruptness of the ending caught even close followers off guard. Part 2 had been divisive among readers, with some criticising its pacing and shorter chapter lengths compared to the original. But it remained commercially massive, and the story was still juggling an ambitious number of subplots when the curtain-call notice arrived.

Denji's contract with Power to find the new Blood Devil has gone unfulfilled. Nayuta, the reincarnated Control Devil, may or may not be dead. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, introduced across both parts, have arcs that feel unfinished. The Primal Fears of Darkness and Falling appeared briefly and then receded. The Prophecy of Nostradamus, set up over a hundred chapters ago, has not yet paid off. Wrapping all of that up in a single chapter would be, by most estimates, impossible.

What happens to the Chainsaw Man franchise after Part 2 ends?

The franchise is far from idle. Studio MAPPA's anime adaptation premiered its first 12-episode season in 2022 and followed it with a theatrical film adapting the Reze Arc, which opened in Japan in September 2025 and saw a strong box office run in India.

At Jump Festa in December, MAPPA announced a new anime project covering the Assassins Arc, though it has not disclosed whether this will be a television series or another film. A stage play adapting the Reze Arc is set for Tokyo and Kyoto from July to August 2026. Separately, Fujimoto's one-shot Look Back is getting a live-action film in 2026.

That pipeline matters commercially. Anime adaptations remain the primary engine for manga sales growth internationally, and Chainsaw Man's biggest circulation jumps, from 18 million to 23 million copies, occurred during the first anime season's broadcast window in late 2022. Ending the manga while multiple adaptation projects are in various stages of production would be an unusual move for Shueisha, though not an unprecedented one.

No official confirmation of a Part 3 exists. Fujimoto has said nothing publicly beyond the chapter's end note. Shihei Lin, the manga's editor, remarked in February that the series was "moving toward its core point," a statement vague enough to support either interpretation. A segment of the fanbase has noted that Chapter 96 of Part 1 carried a nearly identical "final chapter" notice, and that turned out to be the final chapter of Part 1 alone. Part 2 followed after a roughly 18-month break. Whether that precedent holds again is the open question.

There is a meaningful difference, though. Part 1's ending was narratively tidy. Denji defeated Makima, the central antagonist, and the major arcs reached satisfying closure. Part 2 is ending with far more loose ends. If Chapter 232 truly functions as a timeline reset, as Pochita's self-erasure seems to imply, then the story either needs a third part to deal with the fallout or it closes on one of the more ambiguous endings in modern shonen history.

Chapter 232 will be available on Jump+ in Japan and Manga Plus internationally on March 24.