Her streak of A-side appearances ended in 2011, when she lost to Team K captain Sayaka Akimoto at a rock-paper-scissors tournament which determined the featured members for the group's 24th single "Ue kara Mariko".

[11][12] This caused a large buzz in the Japanese news, and spawned a rumor (later proved false) that a student from University of Tokyo had committed suicide over the announcement.

[13] AKB48 later announced that Maeda would leave after the Tokyo Dome concerts;[14] For her final performance, there were 229,096 requests filed for seat tickets.

On June 15, 2013, at AKB48's handshake event held at Makuhari Messe, AKB48 announced that Maeda would appear as a special guest at the group's summer concert series at the Sapporo Dome on July 31.

TV where she played Tamako, a Tokyo University graduate who does not find a job and lives at home where she just eats and sleeps, over the course of the four seasons.

This became a TV drama special, and was developed into a full-fledged film, Tamako in Moratorium, the last of which was planned for a theater release in November 2013.

[30][31] Maeda starred in the film Seventh Code, in which she plays a Japanese woman in Russia who is trying to track down a guy she previously met.

[32] In May 2015, it was announced that Maeda had been cast in the role of Kyoko Yoshizawa, the female lead of the anime and manga series Dokonjō Gaeru (The Gutsy Frog), in a live-action version of the story set to air on Nippon TV in July.

In 2019, she appeared in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's To the Ends of the Earth (旅のおわり世界のはじまり), playing Yoko, a television host and would-be singer who goes to Uzbekistan with a small crew to shoot a travel documentary.

In the film, she twice sings the classic Édith Piaf anthem, Hymne à l'amour (with Japanese lyrics], including in the finale.