Michael B. Jordan made headlines in 2023 when, during the press tour for “Creed III” (a movie very much inspired by action anime), he shared his list of must-see anime, and people quickly noticed the titles all have one thing in common — they were rather long shows with hundreds of episodes each.

Absurdly high episode counts have come to define anime in the eyes of the public for decades, especially since the ’80s, when the adaptation of Akira Toriyama’s “Dragon Ball” began airing and stayed on the air for years and years. Since then, the absolute biggest anime have tended to be those with large episode counts — mostly adaptations of long and equally popular manga series like “Slam Dunk,” “Bleach,” “One Piece,” and “Naruto.” But times have changed, and with “My Hero Academia,” the long-running adaptation of Kohei Horikoshi’s manga series of the same name, now over, the era of the long-running anime adaptation seems to be dead and gone.

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“My Hero Academia” is set in a world where superpowers are commonplace; a young boy is born without a power, but nevertheless enrolls in a prestigious high school for hopeful heroes in training after the world’s Number One hero bestows his power upon him, after recognizing his potential. For eight seasons, fans have followed Izuku Midoriya (Daiki Yamashita) as he trained, learned, gained strength, faced unspeakable danger, and fought the ultimate battle to save the world from the greatest supervillain in history. It’s a story that needed to be told across a long period of time to show its protagonist’s progression over time.

“My Hero Academia” was originally published in Weekly Shonen Jump, the most successful and popular manga magazine in Japan, which has been home to the most iconic series (like “Dragon Ball” and “Naruto”). The magazine is also notorious for having strict deadlines and quotas. If a new manga isn’t successful quickly, it does as soon as it hits print, but if it’s a hit, it can keep going for years and years, with authors having most of their lives revolve around a single series. The grueling demand of having to publish a new chapter every single week has resulted in many manga authors developing health issues, like the creator of “Hunter x Hunter” constantly going on hiatus.

With very long manga series also come very long anime adaptations that, like their source material, were in large part released weekly and without much in terms of breaks. Toei Animation, one of the oldest anime studios in Japan, is responsible for many of these, with long-running shows like “Mazinger Z,” “Saint Seiya,” “Dragon Ball,” and “One Piece.” The weekly release means the adaptation has to stretch every single chapter of the manga and squeeze it for all the story it can give. This results in many issues, mostly the dreaded filler episode, traditionally the result of an anime adaptation catching up to the source material and being forced to produce new stories to literally fill up time until there is new material to adapt. Additionally, the weekly release means these shows tend to have dreadfully long pacing, which is how “Dragon Ball” got fight scenes that stretch over nearly 20 episodes, as well as inconsistent quality of animation.

Now, however, this is coming to an end. Starting in manga, there just aren’t many big, popular manga, at least shonen action ones, that last as long as “My Hero Academia” did. The more recent crop of hits, like “Jujutsu Kaisen” and “Demon Slayer,” all ended with roughly half the number of printed volumes “My Hero Academia” got. Sure, there are still some very popular manga and shows based on them that could still be ongoing in five years, like “Dan Da Dan,” and we also have remnants of the time of long running shows that are yet to finish, like “One Piece” (though it is now fully in its last saga) and “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,” which has been published since 1987 and has a still ongoing anime adaptation from 2012. And that is not to count the many anime adaptations of light novels and webtoons being produced yearly.

Still, these are either older shows that aren’t finished yet, or outliers, and even the older shows are changing tactics and paving the way for an era of shorter anime series. Toei recently announced they will stop the weekly release of the “One Piece” anime and instead produce it seasonally, with a maximum of 26 episodes a year. This means condensing the story, prioritizing pacing and animation quality, which is great, but it comes at the cost of something else. Just like we saw when shows like “Suits” became huge during lockdown because the large number of episodes meant audiences grew to care about the characters and story, so do anime with high episode counts tend to be the ones with the biggest cultural impact. Would Goku be such an icon and arguably the archetypal anime protagonist if “Dragon Ball” had lasted 45 episodes instead of 444?

Anime is not going anywhere, judging by this year’s box office, but it feels like there’s been a paradigm shift. The end of “My Hero Academia” feels like a passing of the torch, like the start of a new era where there is no one single juggernaut anime with hundreds of episodes and a rabid fanbase, where there is no easy consensus on what constitutes essential anime or even just classic anime shows — because there are dozens of similar shows with equally big productions and equally popular source materials. If nothing else, it means Michael B. Jordan may start recommending shows that are a little easier to binge.