Safe to say, Netflix has clearly found its stride when it comes to bringing the most popular anime and anime-inspired shows to its platform. Naruto, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, and several others on Netflix have become fan favorites, while the streamer continues to expand its animated library that is devoured by viewers across the globe in both subtitled and dubbed versions.

But what if one of those two things were to go wrong? It seems something had gone quite wrong, as Netflix just brought out one of its most anticipated releases.

Gintama has survived cancellation, chaos, and its own jokes, but this was not a hurdle fans expected. Since landing on Netflix, the anime’s following has only grown, making the platform’s latest misstep all the more glaring. On February 15, 2026, Netflix released the remaining 24 episodes of the first season across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, only to omit English subtitles entirely.

Gintama lives and dies by timing, comic timing, linguistic timing, and the kind of Japanese wordplay its voice actors deliver with surgical precision. Its long-awaited arrival on Netflix should have been cause for celebration. Instead, the absence of English subtitles has taken the edge off the applause, particularly for viewers who rely on the subbed version to catch every joke. The oversight is all the more baffling given that the series was licensed from Hulu, a platform that managed to offer both dubbed and subtitled editions of the first season without incident.

The same issue had appeared during the release of the first batch of episodes and has reoccurred with this latest release.

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How quickly Netflix will resolve the issue remains uncertain, and delays could potentially affect the release of the next batch of episodes, which may also face problems with the dubbed version.

Netflix must fix the issue soon, as the official English dub for Gintama is not fully complete. While the dub version of Season 1 is available, Seasons 2 and 3 (Episodes 50–150) were added to Hulu in October 2025 with a new dub. Later, Gintama° season (Episodes 266–316) was dubbed by Crunchyroll. 

This left a gap of over 100 episodes in between, which do not have the English dub version. This means fans will eventually have to rely on subtitles for those gap episodes. For now, Netflix fans of Gintama can for the time being explore Netflix's anime library. 

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What do you think about this mistake by Netflix? Let us know in the comments.