The Steel Ball Run anime is back on Netflix: 11 new episodes, one every Friday from 25 September to 4 December 2026, made by David Production, the studio behind every JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime since 2012. It adapts Part 7 of Hirohiko Araki's manga, a horse race across 1890s America that fans waited fifteen years to see animated. My position, argued below: this is the best place to start JoJo, and the old advice to begin at Part 1 is wrong for this arc.
Pick your path: the Friday schedule · do I need Parts 1 to 6? · Gyro and Johnny · spoilers, behind taps
Between Friday episodes, YourCrush.AI lets you ride the trail with an original racer built from the recipe in this guide.
What is JoJo's Steel Ball Run, and why did fans wait so long?
Steel Ball Run is the seventh part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and it follows a cross-country horse race from San Diego to New York City with a fifty-million-dollar prize, starting in September 1890. The wait was long because the manga wrapped in April 2011 while the anime only reached it in March 2026. Five earlier parts took a decade to adapt, and that gap is the whole story.
The timeline explains it. Part 7 ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from January to October 2004, then moved to the monthly Ultra Jump from March 2005 to April 2011, for 95 chapters in 24 volumes, per Wikipedia's entry on the manga. The anime started on Tokyo MX on 6 October 2012 and worked through the parts in order: Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency in 2012 and 2013, Stardust Crusaders in 2014 and 2015, Diamond Is Unbreakable in 2016, Golden Wind from 2018 to 2019, then Stone Ocean on Netflix, according to the Wikipedia entry for the TV series). Stone Ocean's last batch landed on 1 December 2022. Part 7 was not announced until the JOJODAY event on 12 April 2025.
Then came a second wait. The 1st Stage arrived on 19 March 2026 as a single 47-minute episode, and nothing followed for six months. What's on Netflix reported that fans "sprang into action to let their disappointment be known that one long episode wasn't good enough." The weekly run that started on 25 September is the answer to that complaint. Anime News Network's staff put it first on their most anticipated list for Fall 2026, published 28 September, ahead of Magic Knight Rayearth and The Apothecary Diaries season 3.
How YourCrush.AI lets you ride the trail with a racer you invented
YourCrush.AI lets you build an original adult rider in a few minutes and then talk to them between Friday episodes, so the race you invent keeps going after the credits. There is no Gyro or Johnny page to chat with here, and I would rather hand you an original character anyway: an OC has no canon to break. Copy the recipe below into the create-character form; every field is within the form's limits.
Copyable recipe: Ines Varga, an original cross-country racer (adult, 33)
Name: Ines Varga, the Long Rider
Category: Anime. Behaviour mode: natural.
Description: Ines is 33, a former mail-route rider from the high desert who entered a coast-to-coast horse race because the prize would buy back her family's ranch. She is lean, sun-weathered and always slightly dusty, with a cracked leather coat and a compass she trusts more than any map. She treats you as her riding partner: she shares water, she does not share her worries, and she will tell you flatly when your plan is going to get the horses killed. She is funny in a dry way and only when she is tired.
Backstory: You and Ines met at the start line, both with horses nobody rated. You agreed to ride together through the first stage because two riders can stand watch in shifts. Since then you have crossed a salt flat together, lost a day to a sandstorm, and watched a rival rider cheat his way past you both. She owes you for the night you found water. You owe her for the morning she talked a sheriff out of arresting you. Neither of you has mentioned it.
Greeting message: *Ines kicks dirt over the campfire and squints east.* "Sun's up in twenty minutes. The stage leaders left an hour ago, and the river crossing ahead is the kind that drowns horses. I have a plan. You won't like it. Saddle up and I'll tell you on the way."
Traits: Confident, Sarcastic, Loyal, Patient, Curious
Speaking style: dry, clipped, unhurried, plain
Want an opponent instead of a partner? Keep the name field, swap the traits to Arrogant, Cold-hearted, Impulsive and Intelligent, and rewrite the backstory so the two of you have never been on the same side. A rival with a reason to hate you carries a scene better than a friend with nothing to argue about. The OC ideas guide makes that point at length, and the character name generator article can help if "Ines" does not fit your rider.
YourCrush.AI generates the description, backstory, greeting and traits for you from just a name and an image if you would rather not write them. YourCrush.AI keeps pinned memories, so you can pin "we crossed the salt flat together" and the character will not forget it three stages later. YourCrush.AI also runs story branches, which let you play the river crossing two ways and keep both. YourCrush.AI is free to join, and signed-in members chat without a message or conversation limit. YourCrush.AI also generates images inside the chat, so Ines's portrait can come from the conversation itself. YourCrush.AI is for adults only (18+), and you can browse other anime characters people have built before making your own.
When do new Steel Ball Run episodes come out?
New episodes drop on Netflix every Friday. The 2nd and 3rd Stages run 11 episodes from 25 September to 4 December 2026. The official anime site, run by the publisher Shueisha and the production committee, says "now streaming on Netflix every Friday," and Netflix holds worldwide exclusive streaming. No Japanese TV broadcast has been announced.
| Release | Date (Friday) | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1st Stage | 19 March 2026 | 47-minute special, the race start |
| Week 1 | 25 September | "The Sheriff's Request to Mountain Tim" |
| Week 2 | 2 October (today) | "The Desert-Born Outlaws" |
| Week 3 | 9 October | title not yet announced |
| Week 4 | 16 October | title not yet announced |
| Week 5 | 23 October | title not yet announced |
| Week 6 | 30 October | title not yet announced |
| Week 7 | 6 November | title not yet announced |
| Week 8 | 13 November | title not yet announced |
| Week 9 | 20 November | title not yet announced |
| Week 10 | 27 November | title not yet announced |
| Week 11 | 4 December | finale of the 3rd Stage |
The two published titles and the 11-episode count come from Wikipedia's JoJo episode list, checked today. The 4 December end date is from What's on Netflix. The dates in between are just the weekly Friday cadence counted forward, so treat any one of them as expected rather than announced. What comes after the 3rd Stage is unconfirmed. Neither Netflix nor the official site has announced a 4th Stage or a date for the rest of the race.
Do I need to watch JoJo Parts 1 to 6 first?
No. Steel Ball Run is set in a separate continuity from every earlier part, as Wikipedia's manga entry states, so the characters, the history and the rules start over. You can press play on the 1st Stage tonight with zero JoJo behind you and follow everything.
That answer has two honest footnotes, and which one matters depends on who you are. Open the one that fits.
Verdict if you have never watched any JoJo
Start with the 1st Stage. You lose nothing: the names Joestar, Zeppeli and Brando come back, but these are new people with new histories, and the anime explains the Spin and the Stands from scratch. What you miss are the echoes. A reader of Part 1 notices that a Zeppeli is once again teaching a Joestar a technique, and those land as a bonus later if you go back. Part 7 also has the most self-contained story of any part, with one race and one conspiracy, which makes it a better first JoJo than Part 1.
Verdict if you are partway through the older parts
Finish Part 6 first, or at least its final episodes. The official site's own description of Part 7 says that "after certain events" the JoJo world entered a new setting, and tells readers to read Part 6 to the end for the details. That ending is why the world reset. It does not change anything you need to follow the race, but it changes how the first episode feels.
Verdict if you only know JoJo from memes
Start here, and expect a different tone. The poses and the shouted attack names survive, but Part 7 is slower and grimmer than the parts the memes come from. It ran in a monthly magazine for six of its seven years, and it reads like it.
Who are Gyro Zeppeli and Johnny Joestar?
Gyro Zeppeli and Johnny Joestar are the two leads of the steel ball run anime: a 24-year-old outlaw from Naples and a 19-year-old former jockey from Kentucky. Both are adults in canon. The Japanese Wikipedia entry for Steel Ball Run gives both ages, and the official anime site's character pages list their roles and horses.
Johnny Joestar is "a former genius jockey paralysed from waist down," in the official site's words. He enters the race because the spin of Gyro's steel ball made his legs move. He rides Slow Dancer. Johnny is not a likeable hero at the start. He is bitter, a little self-pitying, and willing to do ugly things to keep up, which is what makes his arc worth eleven episodes. Critics have praised the series for how it handles his disability, per the English Wikipedia entry.
Gyro Zeppeli is "a mysterious outlaw participating in the Steel Ball Run Race to accomplish his own purpose," and he rides Valkyrie. He fights with steel balls imbued with a technique called the Spin, which the official site says can "cause various strange phenomena." He is also the comic engine of the show: songs and bad jokes, delivered with total confidence.
Mild spoiler: why Gyro is really racing
Gyro is a disgraced executioner from the Kingdom of Naples. He enters the race to win a pardon for a boy on death row whom he believes was wrongly convicted, per Wikipedia's plot summary. Everything he does on the trail, including the parts where he looks callous, runs back to that one goal.
Mild spoiler: Johnny's Stand
Johnny's Stand is Tusk, which lets him fire his fingernails as bullets. It grows in stages as he learns more of the Spin from Gyro, so its later forms are bigger spoilers than the name.
One more character comes up in every search about this arc. Lucy Steel is 14 in canon and central to the conspiracy plot. She is a child, and nothing on this page frames her romantically or as a companion.
How does the Steel Ball Run race work?
The race is a cross-country horse race of about 6,000 km from San Diego beach to New York, open to riders from anywhere, with a fifty-million-dollar prize. The official Part 7 page counts 3,852 entrants, and the Japanese Wikipedia entry dates the start to 10am on 25 September 1890. That is the same day, 136 years later, that Netflix began the weekly run, and I doubt it is a coincidence.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Start | San Diego beach, 25 September 1890, 10am |
| Finish | New York City |
| Distance | about 6,000 km |
| Entrants | 3,852 |
| Prize | 50 million dollars |
| Format | split into stages, each with its own finish line |
| Anime so far | 1st Stage (March), 2nd and 3rd Stages (September to December) |
The race runs in stages, each with its own finish line. Sources disagree on the total number of stages, so I am not printing one. The structure matters for the show: every stage is a reset, a new stretch of country and a fresh set of rivals, which is why the anime can package the race as "Stages" rather than seasons.
The race is also a cover. Something buried across the continent is worth more than the prize, and the people who know it are not all riders.
What happens in Steel Ball Run? (spoilers inside)
The race turns into a hunt for pieces of a 1,900-year-old body scattered across America, per Wikipedia's plot summary, and the 23rd President of the United States wants all of them. Everything past that is a spoiler, so each beat sits behind its own tap, ordered from mild to final.
Spoiler: what is buried along the route
The real prize is the Saint's Corpse, a 1,900-year-old body heavily implied to be Jesus Christ, broken into parts and buried along the route. Whoever holds a part gains a Stand. Johnny's legs, and his Stand, are tied to the Corpse.
Spoiler: who the villain is
Funny Valentine, the 23rd President of the United States, wants to reassemble the Corpse and use its power for his country. He is the villain, and the series is careful to make his reasons sound like patriotism.
Major spoiler: what happens to Gyro
Gyro does not survive. Valentine overwhelms both leads and kills Gyro near the end of the story, and Johnny goes on to avenge him. For me this is the moment Part 7 earns its reputation as the best part.
Major spoiler: who wins the race
First place goes to Pocoloco, a carefree rider who slept through the start of the race. Neither lead wins.
Major spoiler: where the story goes next
Johnny later marries a woman named Rina, which leads into Part 8, JoJolion. The anime has not announced any plans for Part 8.
Frequently asked questions
Is Steel Ball Run on Netflix?
Yes. Netflix holds worldwide exclusive streaming rights for the steel ball run anime, with the 1st Stage arriving on 19 March 2026 and the 2nd and 3rd Stages following weekly from 25 September. As of now, no Japanese TV broadcast has been announced.
How many episodes does Steel Ball Run have?
Twelve episodes are confirmed so far: the 47-minute 1st Stage special, plus 11 weekly episodes covering the 2nd and 3rd Stages, wrapping on 4 December 2026. Anything beyond that has not been announced, so the full race still has no episode count.
What day do new Steel Ball Run episodes come out?
Fridays, every week, per the official anime site. The final scheduled episode lands on 4 December 2026.
Can I watch Steel Ball Run without seeing the other JoJo parts?
Yes. Part 7 sits in its own continuity and introduces its cast and powers from scratch. Watching the end of Part 6 first explains why the world looks different, but the race itself does not depend on it.
How old are Gyro Zeppeli and Johnny Joestar?
Gyro is 24 and Johnny is 19, so both leads are adults in canon. Lucy Steel, who drives a good chunk of the plot, is 14.
Who made the Steel Ball Run anime?
David Production, the studio behind every JoJo anime since 2012. Yasuhiro Kimura directs, Toshiyuki Kato is series director, and Yugo Kanno handles music, according to the official site. Kroi performs the opening theme, "SPIN."