Boruto watch order

Why the filler lists disagree so badly

One widely used list calls 28 episodes filler. Another calls 206 filler. Both are counting the same 293 episodes.

Neither of them is wrong, because they are answering different questions. Boruto never fell behind its manga the way Naruto did. The anime started in 2017 with almost nothing to adapt, so it wrote its own story on purpose while the manga went off in another direction. Roughly two thirds of what aired was never in the manga at all.

Count all of that as filler and you get 206. Count only the episodes that adapt nothing and lead nowhere and you get 28. The useful answer is neither number, because on this series anime-original and skippable are not the same thing.

The arc table puts those two facts in separate columns, which is the only way 293 episodes of this make sense on paper.

When Boruto gets good

Episode 157. Kara arrive, and the series that starts there is not the one you have been watching.

If somebody has told you to push through, that is what they are telling you to push through to. Episodes 157 to 220 are the strongest run in the series, and the Kawaki arc at 188 to 220 is the peak of it.

Two earlier arcs are worth staying for on their own terms. Mitsuki’s Disappearance at 71 to 92 is the best long stretch the anime wrote for itself, and Time Slip at 127 to 136 throws Boruto back into his father’s genin years to meet Naruto at twelve. Both are anime-original, and both are better than the adapted material near them.

You do not need Boruto: Naruto the Movie

The film and episodes 51 to 66 tell the same story, the Chūnin Exams and Momoshiki. The anime version runs about four times longer and includes material the film had no room for.

Watch one or the other. Watching both means sitting through the same plot twice, and everything afterwards assumes the series version.

The blocks you can drop

25 to 33, 40 to 50, 67 to 70, 93 to 105, 112 to 119, 152 to 156, 256 to 260 and 274 to 281. That is 63 episodes gone and nothing lost.

Four more are marked optional rather than skippable, because they are self-contained but perfectly good: the escort mission at 120 to 126, the Great Sea Battle of Kirigakure at 232 to 255, the academy arc at 261 to 273, and Sasuke Retsuden at 282 to 286, which is Sasuke and Sakura with Boruto barely in it.

Where it stops, and what came next

Episode 293 does not end the story. It stops mid-plot, and the series went on hiatus in March 2023 with a second part announced and still unmade.

The story carried on in the Two Blue Vortex manga, which picks up three years later. No anime of it has aired. If you finish 293 and go looking for the next episode, that is why there is not one.

Is it worth starting

Only if you liked Naruto enough to want more of that world. Boruto is slow for a hundred episodes and asks for a lot of patience before it repays any of it.

If you have that patience, the sixty episodes before the hiatus are as good as Shippuden at its best. If you do not, Naruto and The Last are already a complete story, and nothing in Boruto is needed to finish it.