‘Re:Zero’ Season 4 Officially Becomes the Highest-Rated Anime in IMDb History

Isekai anime has spent years fighting a reputation problem, often dismissed by critics as a genre built on repetitive tropes and disposable power fantasies. “Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World” has spent four seasons quietly dismantling that reputation, but its latest run has pushed the show into territory no isekai series has ever reached before.

That achievement centers on Season 4, which began airing April 8 and has spent its run collecting some of the most staggering user ratings anime has ever produced on IMDb. Out of the season’s first 11 episodes, eight scored above a 9 out of 10, with the final four episodes forming an unbroken streak of near-perfect scores heading into the season’s midpoint break.

That streak culminated in Episode 11, which achieved a perfect 10/10 rating on IMDb, becoming the first episode of any television show to hit that mark in nine years and the first isekai or light-novel adaptation to ever accomplish it. With more than 23,000 ratings behind that score, the sheer scale of consensus behind a perfect average made the achievement especially rare, since user ratings at that volume typically regress toward more middling numbers rather than converging on perfection.

That episode-level dominance now extends to the season as a whole. Season 4 currently holds a weighted average of 9.4 out of 10 on IMDb, officially making it the highest-rated anime series in the platform’s history, according to data shared by fan account Anime Tokki. That places “Re:Zero” ahead of other acclaimed 2026 contenders, with “My Hero Academia” Season 8 trailing closely at 9.40 based on 176,000 ratings, and “Attack on Titan” Season 3 rounding out the top three at 9.3 with over 1.1 million ratings.

The individual episode breakdown behind that 9.4 average tells its own story of consistency. Episodes across the season’s first cour posted scores ranging from 8.7 to 9.9, with multiple entries clustering in the high 9s as the arc built toward its finale, a run that stands in sharp contrast to the more uneven pacing typical of long-running anime adaptations.

That consistency didn’t come without some pushback, though. According to ScreenRant’s coverage of the milestone, Episode 11’s perfect 10 rating held for nearly a full day before a wave of negative reviews from frustrated fans pulled the score down slightly to 9.9, with the episode’s rating breakdown showing over 51,000 perfect scores against just over a thousand ratings of 1 out of 10, an unusually polarized split even by anime fandom standards.

Season 4’s momentum extended beyond IMDb as well. According to the same ScreenRant report, the season’s strong reception pushed “Re:Zero” up to second place on MyAnimeList’s Top 100 anime rankings, cementing the show’s crossover success across multiple major rating platforms rather than a single outlier data source.

The season’s first cour wrapped on its Episode 11 cliffhanger, leaving protagonist Natsuki Subaru regaining his will to fight following an emotional exchange with Emilia, even as his memories remain unresolved. The second half, titled “The Recapture Arc,” premiered August 12, picking up directly from that emotional high point and continuing to build on the season’s record-breaking reception.

With 44 volumes of source material still available and the anime only partway through adapting that material, “Re:Zero” shows no signs of running out of story to tell. Given how decisively Season 4 has already rewritten the record books for both isekai anime and IMDb’s rating history more broadly, expectations for how “The Recapture Arc” closes out the season are running higher than ever.

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