Beginning March 3, the Naruto Shippuden anime will be focusing on Itachi Uchiha as part of the Itachi The True Legend. These episodes will be based on two official books released in Japan, the first which is 256 pages, while the second book is 288 pages.
Combined, the two books are 544 pages long. We’ve wondered how many episodes that would lead to and we might have the answer. TV Tokyo, the television station which airs Naruto in Japan, has published a website that lists dates for quizzes that seem to be tied with the up-coming Itachi arc. There are nine Thursdays (the day Naruto Shippuden airs) listed. Eight of those are days where there will be a quiz and the ninth and final day is when results will be announced. The first quiz is slated to begin March 3 and the results will be announced May 12.
So, it seems like the Itachi arc will air from March 3 to May 12.
However, you’ll note in our title, we wrote “at least nine episodes?” The reason for that is in 2014, TV Tokyo did a similar quiz promotion with the Kakashi ANBU arc. If our memory serves us correctly, it also had nine days of quiz content (eight with quizzes and one with the final results),
but in actuality the arc was 13 episodes long.
There is the possibility the arc could be less than nine episodes, but based on what we’ve seen with the Kakashi ANBU arc, the up-coming Itachi arc seems to be at least nine episodes.