TL;DR: Manhwa could be Big Three material, according to an argument that keeps resurfacing on r/manhwa: is there a manhwa equivalent to Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach's decade-plus reign over Weekly Shonen Jump? Solo Leveling, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, and Tower of God are the names readers actually nominate, and Solo Leveling's anime run genuinely rivals the original Big Three's biggest streaming numbers. The honest verdict: not yet, and the reason isn't quality. It's serialization length, and the discourse mostly avoids saying that part directly.
We already ranked the best manhwa of all time on this site: eighteen series, split by genre, an actual attempt at a canon. This is a different question, and a harder one to answer honestly. It isn't "what's good." It's "what's big enough to define the medium the way Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach defined an entire magazine for over a decade." A quality ranking and a cultural-dominance argument aren't the same exercise. Treating them as interchangeable is how Reddit threads on this topic talk past each other for thirty replies before anyone notices the mix-up.
The comparison keeps surfacing for a reason. Manhwa's global reach genuinely changed shape over the last three years: Solo Leveling's anime adaptation, Netflix and Crunchyroll licensing entire webtoon catalogs, and a wave of manhwa-to-anime deals that didn't exist a decade ago. Something did shift. Whether it shifted enough to produce a Big Three is the actual question, and it deserves a real answer instead of a hot take.
Key Takeaways
- The term has a specific origin: "Big Three" describes Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach running concurrently in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2001 to 2014, a fan label from the mid-2000s West, never an official Shueisha designation.
- Manhwa could be Big Three discourse is real but unsettled: r/manhwa threads argue this constantly, and no two commenters name the same three series.
- Solo Leveling's anime is the strongest single data point: Season 2 became Crunchyroll's most-watched anime ever, ahead of One Piece and Demon Slayer, per Crunchyroll's own 2025 viewership figures.
- The gap is structural, not qualitative: One Piece is past 1,100 chapters after 29 years; Solo Leveling's manhwa completed at 179 chapters plus 21 side stories in roughly three and a half years.
- Tower of God, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, and Noblesse are the other recurring names, split across an "older tier" and a "current tier" depending which generation of reader you ask.
Overview: What Anime's Big Three Actually Means
The Big Three isn't a prize anyone handed out. It's a label Western anime fandom coined in the mid-2000s after noticing that three Weekly Shonen Jump series, One Piece (started 1997), Naruto (started 1999), and Bleach (started 2001), sat above everything else in the magazine at the same time, for years. All three ran concurrently from 2001 through 2014, more than a decade of simultaneous serialization, and each one individually outlasted most entire manga careers. Naruto closed at 700 chapters in 2014. Bleach closed at 686 chapters in 2016. One Piece is still running, past 1,100 chapters and 29 years in, with no end announced.
That's the bar the phrase describes: not popularity for a season, but popularity sustained across a decade and a half, backed by chapter counts most series never approach even once. Anyone invoking "Big Three" for a newer property is implicitly measuring it against that number, whether they say so or not.
Why the Manhwa Could Be Big Three Argument Started Now
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Three years ago, this wasn't a conversation anyone was having with a straight face. What changed is specific, not vague "manhwa is popular now" hand-waving. Solo Leveling's anime adaptation gave the medium its first genuine global crossover hit, on the same streaming platforms that built the Big Three's own reputation. Crunchyroll and Netflix both moved past licensing single webtoon adaptations, toward signing broader manhwa-to-anime deals. A specific number did the rest of the convincing: by March 2025, Solo Leveling had become the single most-watched anime in Crunchyroll's history, ahead of both One Piece and Demon Slayer on the platform's own viewership data, and it went on to sweep nine categories at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards that year.
That's a real, citable data point, and it's why this argument has teeth instead of being pure vibes. It's also an incomplete one on its own: a single breakout season proves a series can compete with the Big Three's biggest anime moments. It doesn't prove the underlying manhwa can sustain that position across the fifteen-plus years the term actually requires.
Solo Leveling's crossover pulled a lot of new readers toward the hunter-system genre it popularized.
Manhwa Like Solo Leveling →
The Candidates: Who Manhwa Fans Actually Nominate
Here's where the research gets interesting, because the answer isn't clean. Search "manhwa Big Three" and you land on live Reddit threads where readers argue this out in real time, and the nominations split cleanly by generation rather than converging on one list.
The older tier, the one readers old enough to remember pre-2015 webtoons reach for first, is Tower of God, Noblesse, and God of High School. All three predate WEBTOON's global platform push and ran for the better part of a decade. One commenter put it plainly: you don't have to personally like every entry in a Big Three for it to function as one, the same way not everyone loved all of Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece.
The current tier, the one that gets argued about, centers on Solo Leveling and Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, with the third slot contested between The Beginning After the End and Legend of the Northern Blade depending on which thread you're reading. One poster framed it explicitly as generational, the way manga fans talk about pre- and post-Big Three eras: "old school" anchored by Tower of God and God of High School, "new school" anchored by Solo Leveling and Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, and a scattered, no-consensus "new-new" tier nobody agrees on yet.
That lack of consensus is the actual finding, and it cuts against the "manhwa Big Three" framing more than it supports it. The real Big Three didn't need a debate thread to identify itself; three names came up instantly, from readers who'd never argue about anything else in the medium. One commenter in a 36-reply thread said it better than any outside analysis could: the real Big Three is "defined... known all over the world," while the manhwa version "is not defined, that is why this is my opinion." That's not a knock on any individual series. It's a description of where the medium actually is.
Analysis: Why Manhwa Could Be Big Three Runs Into a Longevity Problem
Set the streaming numbers aside and look at the two structural gaps nobody in these threads wants to name directly.
The first is serialization length, and it's the one the numbers make hardest to argue around. Naruto and Bleach each ran 15 years. One Piece has run 29 and counting, and all three overlapped for more than a decade in the same magazine, the actual mechanism that produced the "Big Three" label: sustained, simultaneous, multi-year dominance, not one great year. Compare that to the current manhwa nominees. Solo Leveling's manhwa is complete at 179 chapters plus 21 side stories, a run of roughly three and a half years from 2018 to December 2021. Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint currently reaches Episode 308 (June 2, 2026) after nearly six years and is on a season break with WEBTOON's will-return notice. Tower of God has technically been serializing since 2010, longer than any other current nominee, but it's been on hold since February 2025, and its actual continuous output is a fraction of that 16-year span once the gaps are subtracted. One Redditor put the Solo Leveling comparison bluntly: "It's too short to be considered." That's not a hot take. It's arithmetic.
The second gap is the franchise ecosystem. The original Big Three had decades to build one: licensed games, dozens of theatrical films between them, toy lines and theme park rides that outlived the manga's first hype cycle by years. Manhwa's money model runs through webtoon-app coins and platform-native originals instead, a genuinely different business from magazine sales plus merchandising. It just isn't the same kind of decades-deep cultural footprint yet, and it hasn't had fifteen years to build one.
None of that makes Solo Leveling or Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint lesser works. It makes "Big Three" a specific, high, multi-decade bar that no manhwa has had the runway to clear yet, not a vague popularity threshold any breakout hit can claim after one good year.
Solo Leveling wasn't the only manhwa to make the anime jump this decade.
Manhwa With Anime Adaptations 2026 →
So, Is Manhwa Actually Close?
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Closer than it's ever been, and further than the streaming headlines suggest, both at once. Solo Leveling's anime performance is a real, verifiable data point. It would have been unthinkable for a manhwa property five years ago, and it deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed as a fluke. But a Big Three needs three series clearing that bar together, sustained across the better part of two decades, the way Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach did it at the same time. Manhwa doesn't have three series that old yet. Tower of God is closest on pure years-running, and it's spent a meaningful chunk of that time on hiatus.
The honest read is "not yet, ask again in a decade," not a flat no and not a "basically yes already." Solo Leveling proved the ceiling is real. Whether Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, Tower of God, or a series that hasn't been written yet turns that ceiling into fifteen years of sustained output is a question 2026 can't answer. The Reddit threads arguing about it in real time are proof the question is worth asking now, not after hindsight makes it obvious.
Related Reading
- Best Manhwa of All Time: The quality-ranking counterpart to this piece, eighteen series across every genre instead of an argument about cultural scale.
- Manhwa Like Solo Leveling: More hunter-system and regression picks for readers who arrived through Solo Leveling's anime crossover.
- Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint Manhwa Review: The full case for the series most readers name alongside Solo Leveling in this exact argument.
- Tower of God Review: The longest-running of the recurring nominees, and the one whose hiatus history complicates its own case.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Big Three actually mean in anime and manga?
It's the fan name for Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, three Weekly Shonen Jump series that ran concurrently for over a decade (2001 to 2014) and dominated manga sales, anime ratings, and Western fandom at the same time. It was never an official Shueisha award. Western fans coined it in the mid-2000s, and it stuck because it accurately described three specific books towering over everything else in the same magazine.
Could manhwa be the next Big Three?
Not yet, and the gap isn't quality. Solo Leveling's anime run genuinely rivals the original Big Three's biggest streaming numbers. What's missing is the sustained multi-decade output: Naruto and Bleach each ran 15 years and 680 to 700 chapters, One Piece is past 1,100 chapters after 29 years. Solo Leveling's manhwa is complete at 179 chapters plus 21 side stories, run over roughly three and a half years.
What manhwa do fans actually call the manhwa Big Three?
There's no agreement, which is itself the tell. Reddit threads on r/manhwa split it by generation: an older tier of Tower of God, Noblesse, and God of High School, and a current tier of Solo Leveling, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, and either The Beginning After the End or Legend of the Northern Blade. Ask five readers and you'll get five different lists.
Is Solo Leveling as big as One Piece or Naruto?
On specific 2025 metrics, arguably bigger: Solo Leveling Season 2 became Crunchyroll's most-watched anime in the platform's history, ahead of both One Piece and Demon Slayer, per Crunchyroll's own viewership data. On total output and franchise longevity, no. One Piece alone has been running longer than Solo Leveling's manhwa, anime, and every spinoff combined will exist for.
Is Tower of God part of the manhwa Big Three?
It's the name that shows up most often in the older generational tier, alongside Noblesse and God of High School, in the Reddit threads where this argument actually happens. It's also been serializing since 2010, longer than any other manhwa regularly nominated, though multiple hiatuses (it's been on hold since February 2025) complicate the longevity case in its favor.
Why hasn't a manhwa reached true Big Three status yet?
Two structural reasons, not a quality gap. First, serialization length: the webtoon model tends to produce either a complete run in a few years (Solo Leveling) or long hiatuses between seasons (Tower of God, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint), neither of which matches 15-plus years of continuous weekly output. Second, franchise ecosystem: the original Big Three built decades of games, films, and merchandising that no manhwa property has had time to build yet.
