Naruto Fans Are Trying Very Hard To Pretend That Boruto Is No Longer Canon

On October 10, Naruto’s original author and illustrator announced that a new canon manga titled Naruto: Shadow Rising is set to be released sometime in 2027. This is great news if you love Naruto. However, if you hate Boruto, it’s incredible news—or at least, that’s what some people would lead you to believe.

Following Naruto: Shadow Rising’s reveal at NYCC, several posts online have attempted to twist the announcement into something else entirely: confirmation that Boruto, Mikio Ikemoto’s ongoing sequel to Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto, is officially no longer canon.

Now, rumors like this aren’t usually newsworthy, but this one has started to get somewhat out of hand. A viral post on X with almost 5 million views, posted on October 14, claimed that Kishimoto outright stated that “Boruto is an alternate universe” in a 2024 interview. Another post on X stated that Kishimoto “officially confirms” Boruto is now non-canon, by using a video of the author from 2017.

Obviously, these quotes have been taken wildly out of context—something one of the posters on X quite brazenly admitted to. Well, I say “obviously,” yet there are hundreds of posts on X, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, and even a few different news sites from people who have either fallen for this bullshit or are intentionally pushing this made-up rumor for engagement. It’s even led to some fans labelling Ikemoto’s manga as “Boruto GT,” a reference to the non-canon Dragon Ball anime, Dragon Ball GT. 

This has resulted in a bit of a pushback elsewhere. A “Boruto Canonicity Megathread” went live on the r/Boruto subreddit earlier today, and content creators elsewhere are also doing their best to debunk the fake rumor. You know things have gotten out of hand when a content creator literally named Naruto Explained has to explain to Naruto fans that they’re being fed a lie.

But how has such an easily disprovable narrative managed to spread like this? I think there are two reasons. Firstly, yeah, some people really, really do not like Boruto, which both explains why this rumor was made up in the first place, and also why so many Naruto fans are so keen to—ahem—believe it.

The second reason is a lot murkier. Naruto: Shadow Rising is clearly set between the end of Naruto and the start of Boruto, which is obvious considering that Sarada, who is 11 at the start of Boruto, is a baby in the Naruto: Shadow Rising promo art. There is room in here for Kishimoto to wipe the slate clean and start again—something that, yes, publisher Shueisha might be keen on considering Boruto’s sales numbers.

This is the part that makes it murky; as of October 2025, Shueisha confirmed 10 million copies of the Boruto manga are in “total circulation in Japan.” As of 2023, the first “72” Naruto books had sold over a combined 250 million copies worldwide, with roughly 150 million of those sales supposedly from Japan. The “72” part is important here because it means that it doesn’t include Boruto: Naruto Next Generations’ manga sales, which began in 2016.

The issue is that a lot more people buy and read manga online these days, so perhaps this doesn’t fully encapsulate Boruto’s popularity—or lack thereof. Still, it doesn’t look great, so perhaps Shueisha would prefer that Naruto: Shadow Rising does render Boruto non-canon.

To that end, Kotaku has reached out to Viz Media, Naruto’s official American publisher, to confirm whether Kishimoto truly intends to decanonize Boruto.