WIT Studio, the studio behind the first three seasons of Attack on Titan, posted a teaser visual this week pointing at one date, August 20th, and said almost nothing else about it.
The caption mentions the characters holding a "special dinner" around that time, and the image gives you six familiar faces. That's the whole announcement. No project name, no format, no runtime!
So of course everyone has started guessing. I want to walk through what the visual actually shows, because two of those six faces rule out the thing most fans are hoping for!
The lineup, as reported by Anime Corner: Eren, Mikasa, Armin, Levi, Erwin Smith, and Hange Zoe.
If you've finished the series, read that list again…
Erwin dies in the Battle of Shiganshina, in the back half of season 3. Hange dies during the final season. Both of them are gone well before the story wraps, which means a visual with the two of them standing alongside a young Eren, Mikasa, and Armin isn't showing you anything that happens after the ending.
Whatever this is, it lives in the WIT era of the story.
WIT animated seasons 1 through 3 between 2013 and 2019, then MAPPA took over for the final season and carried it to the finish. A WIT teaser was always more likely to point backward at WIT's own stretch of the story than to announce a continuation the studio doesn't animate.
A closer look at the visual, per ComicBook.com, describes Mikasa wearing an eyepatch she never wears anywhere in the story, and Eren messing around with what look like noodles. Those aren't story details. They're the kind of playful, out-of-continuity touches you get on a food collaboration or a merchandise line, and that outlet reads the teaser as pointing that direction rather than at new animation.
Which is worth sitting with before anyone gets too excited. "Special dinner" might be exactly as literal as it sounds. A restaurant tie-in, a cafe collab, a themed food campaign. Japan runs those constantly for big franchises, and an eyepatch gag on Mikasa fits a promotional illustration far better than it fits a story beat.
Nobody outside WIT knows which one it is right now, and anyone telling you otherwise on August 16th is guessing with far more confidence than the evidence supports.
What I can tell you is that the franchise isn't sitting quiet at the moment. MAPPA is handling the opening cinematic for Attack on Titan 3, the game we covered earlier this month, which lands December 10th on PS5, Switch 2, Xbox, and PC. The studio also put out its own anniversary key visual back in June.
Both studios have Attack on Titan projects in the air right now, doing completely different things. It's a big franchise with a lot of moving parts.
One thing I checked and couldn't confirm: there's no round anniversary landing here. The manga started serialization in Kodansha's Bessatsu Shonen Magazine back in September 2009, and the anime premiered in April 2013. That puts 2026 at year seventeen for the manga and year thirteen for the anime. Neither is the kind of milestone number a studio builds a campaign around, and nothing ties August 20th to either debut. If you see "anniversary project" floating around as an explanation, treat it as a guess.
For a series that ended its anime run in 2023, this is a fun position to be in. The story's finished. The ending is out there. And the studio that started it is still finding reasons to put these characters back in front of us, even if this particular reason turns out to be a bowl of ramen!
We'll know on Thursday, August 20th.
So what's your read? A compilation project, a WIT-era rewatch push, a food collab, or something nobody has floated yet? If it turns out to be merchandise instead of new animation, is that a letdown, or is any excuse to see Erwin and Hange again fine by you?
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