Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury will run in two separate cours. The first one will run from October-December 2022, and the second will follow in April-June 2023. Bandai Namco’s Chief Gundam Officer (CGO), Kouji Fujiwara, revealed the plan at the Gundam Conference Autumn 2022 presentation stream.
Fujiwara also revealed that MBS and TBS will air TV versions of Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway, Thunderbolt, and Narrative for the January-March 2023 period. While the Thunderbolt OVA already comprises four episodes, Bandai Namco and Sunrise will split the Hathaway and Narrative movies into four episodes each.
The whole schedule will be part of the larger Gundam Next Future: Road To 2025 project. The companies will also regularly air prior Gundam titles like Iron-Blooded Orphans and the SEED series on YouTube and the BS11 channel. At the 19:10 mark, the presentation slide shows that MBS and TBS’ Sunday 5 PM slot will feature Gundam titles from October 2022 to June 2023. It also implies that The Witch from Mercury will have a total of two cours with around 24 to 26 episodes.
The Witch from Mercury will not be the first Gundam title to have two separate sessions, although it remains to be seen if it will have a time skip between them. The 2007 title Mobile Suit Gundam 00 and 2015’s Iron-Blooded Orphans had two separate half-year seasons, with a time skip happening in the middle of both titles. The 2011 Gundam AGE was a recent outlier for having a continuous airing for almost a full year despite featuring two generational time skips. If The Witch from Mercury only has two cours in total, it will follow the steps of Yoshiyuki Tomino’s 2014 entry, Reconguista in G, which only had 26 episodes.
At the 18:35 mark on the stream, Fujiwara also reveals a list of overseas companies that plan to publish The Witch from Mercury worldwide. Other than Bandai Namco’s Asian branches, the list also includes Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix, and Odex.
The Prologue episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is available to watch worldwide on the GundamInfo YouTube channel. The first episode will air on October 2, 2022.
