STEEL BALL RUN JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure 1st STAGE

Set in the United States in 1890, this opening installment introduces the Steel Ball Run, a transcontinental horse race that will carry its riders roughly 4,000 miles from San Diego to New York City. Competitors from around the world gather for a contest with an enormous cash prize and a reputation that draws both seasoned professionals and dangerous opportunists. The first stage covers the earliest leg of that journey, establishing the race, its rules, and the wide field of riders before the true scale of the event becomes clear.

At the center of the story is Johnny Joestar, a former prodigy jockey whose career ended when he lost the use of his legs. Reduced to watching from the sidelines and drifting without purpose, Johnny crosses paths with Gyro Zeppeli, a brash and unconventional horseman with a technique unlike anything Johnny has seen. The strange effects produced by Gyro's steel balls rekindle something in Johnny, and he resolves to enter the race himself, chasing both the prize and a faint hope tied to that mysterious power.

What begins as a straightforward competition quickly suggests deeper stakes, as the two riders form an uneasy partnership on the trail and other participants reveal motives that have little to do with prize money. This single episode stands as the first stage of the story, laying out the premise, the central pair, and the conflicts that will shape the race ahead without resolving them.

This 1st Stage release adapts the opening of Hirohiko Araki's Steel Ball Run, the seventh part of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure manga, and functions as the sixth season of the anime produced by David Production. The source material is Araki's manga, and the installment was made for streaming rather than for a television broadcast slot.

As with the preceding season, the work arrived worldwide as an original net animation on Netflix. Its single 47 minute episode premiered on March 19, 2026, and an English dub was produced alongside the Japanese audio.

The production continued with a further cours of eleven episodes, designated the 2nd and 3rd Stages, which was set to begin a weekly streaming run on September 25, 2026 while carrying the same adaptation forward.

Steel Ball Run is the seventh part of Hirohiko Araki's long-running JoJo's Bizarre Adventure manga, and this release opens its anime adaptation. Within the franchise's animated lineage it stands as the sixth season from David Production, arriving after the adaptation of the sixth part. Instead of retelling earlier events, it launches a new storyline with a fresh cast and a new setting, making it a fresh starting point for the saga rather than a direct continuation of the characters who carried the previous season.

This entry covers only the first piece of that adaptation. Titled 1st Stage, it delivers the story's opening stretch as a single 47-minute original net animation episode, released worldwide through Netflix on March 19, 2026, following the same distribution approach used for the season before it. The remaining cours, labeled the 2nd and 3rd Stages, continue the same adaptation with a weekly streaming rollout later the same year. Fans approaching the franchise through earlier animated parts should view this as the beginning of a distinct arc, with the later stages completing the material this premiere introduces.