Jujutsu Kaisen Season 4 Gets a New Teaser Visual, and Sukuna Is Back in the Picture

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 4 is officially locked in, and fans are diving deep into the dark corners of the Culling Game.

There are some anime announcements that need a two-minute trailer to get fans talking. Then there are Jujutsu Kaisen announcements, where a single image can send the entire fandom into theory mode. That is exactly what happened as the latest milestone visual dropped.

The newest reveal is the Super Teaser Visual for Jujutsu Kaisen Season 4: Culling Game Part 2. Released on August 29 as part of the ongoing Juju Fest 2026 celebrations, the artwork puts Ryomen Sukuna at the absolute centre of a strangely unsettling scene. He appears to be submerged underwater, emerging from the pitch darkness with one hand reaching forward. It doesn't explain anything, and it doesn't appear to confirm a particular manga scene, but that almost makes the image more interesting.

For a series that has made a habit of turning its characters' lives into increasingly complicated disasters, the visual feels very much at home. There is no enormous cursed technique exploding in the background and no lineup of characters posing for the camera. It is simply Sukuna staring out from the darkness, and somehow that is enough to remind manga readers exactly how dangerous the road ahead is. More importantly, today's visual arrives only a couple of months after the first Season 4 teaser gave fans their first proper glimpse at what Culling Game Part 2 has in store.

Culling Game Part 2 is where the story starts becoming even more unpredictable

By now, Jujutsu Kaisen has moved far beyond the relatively straightforward premise it had in its first season. What started as Yuji Itadori swallowing one of Sukuna's fingers and being pulled into the world of jujutsu sorcerers has gradually turned into a much larger conflict involving Kenjaku, the Culling Game, ancient sorcerers, Sukuna, and a growing number of characters whose individual stories are colliding. The scale of the conflict is matching the epic milestones of other final sagas, such as the ongoing climax of One Piece.

The first teaser for Season 4, released in June, made that scale pretty clear. It featured glimpses of Hakari, Kashimo, Maki, Choso, and Yuki, along with Yuji and Megumi. For manga readers, even those brief shots were enough to know that the adaptation is approaching some of the most important and heavily discussed material in the Culling Game. There is a lot happening at the same time, which is both the attraction and the challenge of this part of the story. Almost every major character is dealing with something different, and several of those individual conflicts eventually begin to overlap. That is why simply calling Season 4 “the next batch of JJK fights” would be selling it short. The fights are certainly coming. But what happens around them is arguably more important.

Hakari vs Kashimo could steal the spotlight

There is one fight, however, that is almost impossible to ignore: Kinji Hakari vs Hajime Kashimo.

Even before the anime adaptation, the confrontation became one of the most talked-about battles in the Culling Game. Hakari is one of those characters whose abilities are difficult to explain without making them sound completely ridiculous, while Kashimo enters the story with an almost obsessive desire to find an opponent capable of giving him the fight he wants. Their clash is exactly the kind of confrontation that makes Jujutsu Kaisen work so well. Neither character feels like they have simply been placed in the story because the author needed another powerful fighter. Their personalities, motivations, and abilities all feed into the battle.

The June teaser gave us only a glimpse, but that may actually be a good thing. One of the pleasures of watching JJK has always been discovering how a character's technique works rather than having everything explained beforehand through promotional material. Now the pressure moves to MAPPA. The studio has already established an extremely high visual standard for the series, so simply making the fight look spectacular will not be enough. The choreography needs to preserve the strange tactical rhythm of the manga, where a battle can shift direction because one character notices a tiny opening or finds a completely unexpected way to use their technique. If MAPPA gets that right, Hakari and Kashimo could easily become one of the defining fights of the season.

There is also a change behind the camera

Season 4 is not simply continuing with exactly the same directing setup. According to the official staff information, Takashi Sato will serve as director for Culling Game Part 2, while Shota Goshozono is credited as chief director. Sato has already worked on the Culling Game adaptation, so this isn't a completely unfamiliar team taking over the material. That change is worth watching because Culling Game Part 2 presents a very different adaptation challenge.

The story is crowded. There are several locations, multiple groups of characters, and a considerable amount of information for the audience to keep track of. If the anime moves too quickly from one confrontation to another, some of the emotional weight could easily disappear underneath the spectacle. And that would be a shame, because the strongest part of this material isn't necessarily the number of cursed techniques on display. It is what those fights do to the characters.

Yuji has become a very different character

This is probably the part of Season 4 we are most interested in at ZealPlane. Sukuna may be the character everyone notices first, but Yuji remains the emotional centre of Jujutsu Kaisen. The boy we met at the beginning of the series has been through an extraordinary amount of suffering, and the story has gradually stripped away the easy optimism he once carried.

At the beginning, Yuji entered the world of jujutsu almost accidentally. He wanted to help people, protect his friends, and make sure that his grandfather's final advice meant something. The Culling Game version of Yuji is different. He understands much more about the world he has been dragged into, but that knowledge hasn't necessarily made things easier. If anything, it has made the burden heavier. His relationship with Sukuna is still hanging over everything he does, and the consequences of Sukuna's actions are impossible for Yuji to simply separate from himself. That is why putting Sukuna in the centre of the new Season 4 visual feels significant even if the artwork itself doesn't reveal a specific plot point. Every time Sukuna appears, Yuji is never far away from the conversation.

And then there is Megumi

If you are an anime-only viewer, this is probably the point where you should stop looking for spoilers. Seriously. The further the story goes, the harder it becomes to discuss Megumi without accidentally stepping into territory that the anime hasn't reached yet. What makes his situation particularly painful is that Megumi has never been a character who simply wanted to become the strongest sorcerer around. His motivations have always been much more personal. He wanted to protect the people he believed deserved to be saved, even if his methods and worldview were often complicated.

His relationship with Yuji is also one of the reasons the Culling Game works on an emotional level. Their friendship isn't the loud, sentimental kind you often see in shonen anime. It developed naturally through shared experiences, arguments, and the increasingly dangerous situations they found themselves in. As the story progresses, those connections become much more important. And much more painful.

Maki, Choso, Yuki and Kenjaku are bringing their own stories

One of the biggest mistakes would be to look at Culling Game Part 2 as if everything revolves around Yuji and Sukuna. It doesn't. Maki has her own transformation and her own reasons for becoming stronger. Choso's journey has developed into something far more emotional than his early appearances suggested. Yuki Tsukumo finally gets a much larger role in the conflict, while Kenjaku continues to operate with motives that make the entire Culling Game feel like part of something much bigger. That is one of the reasons the arc can feel overwhelming when described on paper. There are too many characters. Too many abilities. Too many moving pieces. But once those pieces are on screen, the appeal becomes clearer. Each character is approaching the same disaster from a different direction. And eventually, those directions collide.

Don't read too much into the Sukuna visual — but don't ignore it either

This is where the distinction between news and fan speculation matters. The new Super Teaser Visual does not officially confirm that a particular Sukuna scene from the manga will appear exactly as depicted. The official announcement presents it as a teaser visual rather than a detailed plot reveal. So anyone claiming that the image definitively confirms a specific future event is getting ahead of the evidence.

But the choice to put Sukuna front and centre is still interesting. After everything that has happened in Jujutsu Kaisen, the character has become more than simply another powerful villain. Sukuna represents the terrifying side of the jujutsu world that Yuji has been forced to carry with him since the beginning. Even when he isn't physically present in a scene, his existence changes the stakes. That is probably why the visual works. You don't need an explosion. You just need to remember who you're looking at.

When will Jujutsu Kaisen Season 4 release?

For now, fans will have to wait. The official announcements have confirmed Culling Game Part 2, revealed the production staff, and released promotional footage and the new Super Teaser Visual, but there is still no exact premiere date to point to. That hasn't stopped speculation from spreading online, but unless a release date comes directly from the official channels, it is better to treat those reports as rumours rather than confirmation.

The good news is that the franchise is clearly moving forward. Juju Fest 2026 is taking place on August 29 and 30 as part of the anime's fifth-anniversary celebrations, with performances, music, and special stages planned across the two-day event. So there is a reasonable chance that the celebration will bring more information as it unfolds. Stay tuned to the ZealPlane Comic Hub for real-time updates as they drop live from Tokyo.

The real test for Season 4 isn't how big the fights look

This is where I think the next season could either become another major high point for Jujutsu Kaisen or simply become known as “the season with all those crazy fights.” The latter would be a missed opportunity. The Culling Game has spectacle in abundance. What it needs from the anime is breathing room between that spectacle — the small character moments, the consequences of decisions, and the sense that these people are actually being changed by everything happening around them. MAPPA has already shown that it can produce some extraordinary action sequences. Now the challenge is making the audience care just as much about what happens after the fight as they do about the fight itself.

That is especially important for Yuji and Megumi. Because by this stage of the story, the question isn't simply whether they can survive the next battle. It's whether they'll still be the same people when it is over.

And that new Sukuna image?

It probably doesn't contain the giant spoiler some fans are hoping to uncover. But it doesn't need to. Sometimes a teaser works because of everything the audience already knows. We see Sukuna in the darkness, reaching towards us, and immediately remember the danger surrounding Yuji, the uncertainty around Megumi, and the enormous conflict that continues to spread through the Culling Game.

There are still a lot of questions waiting for answers. Who will survive? How far will Yuji be pushed? What exactly does Kenjaku have planned? Where does Sukuna's story ultimately lead? And perhaps most importantly, what will be left of these characters when the Culling Game finally ends?

For now, Jujutsu Kaisen isn't answering any of them. Instead, it has given us one unsettling picture and left the fandom to do what it does best — stare at it, zoom into every corner, and start arguing about what it might mean. And considering what this series has done to us already, maybe that's exactly how it should be.

Stay tuned to the ZealPlane Comic Hub for more anime news, chapter breakdowns, and original webcomic releases!