‘Overlord’ Season 4 Release Date: Possible Reasons Why Madhouse Maintains its Silence About Fourth Installment

Five months have passed into 2019 and Madhouse has yet to break its silence regarding “Overlord” Season 4. The major reason why the studio hasn’t announced anything is due to the issues regarding the source material.

So far, author Kugane Maruyama has yet to reveal the exact release date of Volume 14 as he’s also working on an unnamed project at the moment. However, we do know that it will come out later this year. Volume 15, on the other hand, might be released in the last quarter of 2020. This poses a huge problem for “Overlord” Season 4.

As has been observed, Madhouse has followed a pattern of adapting three volumes for each installment. This means that “Overlord” Season 4 might be telling the story of Volume 10 to 12. The problem is that Volume 12 and 13 have been written as a two=part story, which means there’s no obvious stopping point in Volume 12.

This leaves the studio the choice of ending “Overlord” Season 4 with a cliffhanger. But as has been pointed out before, this is a bad idea since it will take years before the fifth entry sees daylight, a fact that will surely vex the series’ fan base.

Another option for Madhouse is to adapt Volume 10 to 13. But this, too, poses a complication of its own as 13 episodes might not be enough to cram all that plot into a single-cour installment. Of course, the studio could cut out a lot of stories involving secondary characters, but that will also anger fans. In short, it’s not that “Overlord” Season 4 is suffering from a lack of source material per se.

It’s just that Volume 12 and 13 are difficult to adapt due to how massive their plot is, especially since they are a two-part story. Volume 12 has 410 pages, while Volume 13 has 574. Cramming that into the series, along with Volume 10 and 11 will be impossible since it’s expected that “Overlord” Season 4 will only have 13 episodes.

If worse comes to worst, the next installment might be released in 2021 as Madhouse can opt to wait until Volume 15 comes out in 2020 and create a two-cour entry with 26 episodes. This sprawling installment will then adapt Volume 10 to 15, with a few months of hiatus in between. But this is all banking on the fact that Volume 15 will be released in 2020 since – as mentioned before – Maruyama is also working on another unknown project. Hopefully, Maruyama maintains his pattern of releasing one volume each year so no further delay might plague this popular series.