Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back: Mewtwo, New Island and the 2.2 million admissions of 2000

In France, the first Pokémon feature film isn't called Mewtwo Strikes Back: it's simply called Pokémon: The First Movie. Released in Japan on July 18, 1998, and then in French theaters on April 5, 2000, it tells the story of a lab-made creature that refuses the role written for it. Behind the yellow poster and the merchandising, it's the darkest film in the entire saga. Here's the complete guide: what it's about, how it was made, and why, to this day, it remains the biggest Japanese hit ever released in French theaters.

Contents

• A film released amid turmoil
• The plot, without spoiling the ending
• Mewtwo, an antagonist who isn't a villain
• Who travels with Ash in this film
• Two films in one: what the Japanese version adds
• Production and music
• Lukewarm reviews, a commercial smash
• The French release: April 5, 2000
• What the film left behind
• Pokémon: The First Movie at a glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

A film released amid turmoil

In the summer of 1998, Pokémon wasn't yet the global phenomenon we know today. The anime had just come through its worst crisis: the broadcast of episode 38, in December 1997, had triggered epileptic seizures in young Japanese viewers, and the anime was suspended for four months. When the film hit Japanese theaters on July 18, 1998, the production was only just getting its head back above water.

That interruption had a direct and very concrete consequence for the film. The three episodes meant to set the stage — the ones where Mewtwo escapes and Gary takes on Giovanni — only aired in September and October 1998, in other words after the film's release. Japanese audiences therefore discovered Mewtwo in theaters before seeing him on TV. Without that forced break, the film would have come out much later in the series timeline.

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Takeshi Shudō, the series' head writer, seized the opportunity. He had long wanted to give the franchise a more adult tone, and he got his script approved while the studio's attention was elsewhere, busy handling the crisis. The result is a film about death, cloning and discrimination, in a franchise designed to sell games to ten-year-olds.

On the technical side, the project was modest. Its budget has never been established: three incompatible figures circulate, $5 million in the English Wikipedia infobox, $10 million at JP Box-Office, $30 million at both Box Office Mojo and The Numbers, and none of them is backed by a production document. Whichever figure is right, the outlay bears no comparison to what the film would go on to earn. It was produced by studio OLM, directed by Kunihiko Yuyama and distributed in Japan by Toho. In theaters, it was preceded by a short film, Pikachu's Vacation — a practice that would become a tradition of the saga, which you'll find covered in our overview of all 23 Pokémon films.

The plot, without spoiling the ending

It all begins in a laboratory funded by Team Rocket. There, scientists recreate a Pokémon from the genetic material of Mew, the rarest species of all. What they get is Mewtwo. The creature exceeds all their predictions, understands what is expected of it, and refuses. It destroys the laboratory and vanishes.

Some time later, a Dragonite delivers invitations to the best Trainers in the region. A tournament awaits them on New Island, hosted by someone who calls himself the greatest Pokémon Trainer in the world. A storm of unnatural violence breaks out just as the boats are due to leave, and only a handful of Trainers choose to brave the sea: Neesha, Fergus and Corey. Ash and his friends don't have the Pokémon it would take — it's Team Rocket, in disguise, who get them there safely.

🎭 Ash only reaches New Island because a disguised Team Rocket ferries him through the storm, and the ruse works just as well at your next costume party with our Pokémon costumes.

On the island, the welcome is chilling. A Nurse Joy who had been reported missing leads them to a hall where the other Trainers are waiting. Mewtwo then reveals himself and announces his plan: pit his clones against the original Pokémon, then wipe out a world he considers unworthy. The first clash is a massacre. The clones of Blastoise, of Venusaur and of Charizard overpower their originals with ease.

Then comes the toughest part of the film: the capture of every Pokémon on the island, the cloning machine, and an all-out battle in which each creature fights its own copy. Mew eventually appears to stop Mewtwo, and the film tips into a final scene remembered for its gravity, in which Ash throws himself between them. We won't give away what happens next: it's the sequence everyone remembers, and it deserves to be seen rather than summarized.

Mewtwo, an antagonist who isn't a villain

Mewtwo isn't your classic tyrant. He's a manufactured being trying to find out why he exists, and every answer he has received so far has been purely utilitarian: you're a weapon, you're an experiment, you're Giovanni's property. The character's violence springs from that void, not from any lust for conquest. From the outset, the film sets him up as a mirror held up to the viewer: what is the point of a creature created to serve?

The film builds that identity in contrast to Mew, the original. Where Mewtwo is angular, closed off and tormented, Mew is playful and carefree, which makes their clash all the more unsettling. Mew belongs to the Mythical Pokémon category, species you don't come across in the normal course of the game, while Mewtwo is a Legendary Pokémon, a closely related but distinct category, as detailed in our guide to Legendary and Mythical Pokémon.

Screenwriter Takeshi Shudō explained that he drew on his own earlier work on a magical girl series to give Mewtwo a search for identity and an artificial being's revolt. The character is conceived as a subject, not an obstacle — which explains why he would later return in a special episode of the series, and then in a full CGI remake released in 2019.

One plot detail also had a long afterlife. The idea of seizing a Trainer's Pokémon to corrupt or copy them would be reused five years later for an entire game, with the Shadow Pokémon we cover in detail in our guide Pokémon Colosseum and XD.

Who travels with Ash in this film

This is the point people most often misremember, because Ash's companions change from one film to the next. In Pokémon: The First Movie, Ash travels with Misty and Brock, the original lineup from the early days of the series. The hero's full journey is traced in our guide Ash and the Pokémon anime.

As for his team, Ash fields the Pokémon from his early days: Pikachu, of course, but also Bulbasaur, Squirtle and a still-disobedient Charizard. The Togepi you see in the film belongs to Misty, not Ash — a common mix-up. That Togepi also shares a unique status with James's Weezing: they are the only two Pokémon on New Island that never get cloned.

The three Trainers invited to the island — Neesha, Fergus and Corey — don't appear anywhere else in the TV series, but they turn up again in the 2019 remake, Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution. They serve as a yardstick: they're the best, and they lose in a matter of seconds. The film uses their defeat to establish the clones' overwhelming superiority before Ash even enters the fray.

Team Rocket, for their part, play an unusual role here. Jessie, James and Meowth aren't the antagonists but stowaways, and they're the ones who get the group to the island. Giovanni, on the other hand, appears in the opening part of the film, as the backer of the cloning program.

Three dubbing errors have survived the decades without ever being corrected, and all three come from the American adaptation on which the French version is based. The film's Pidgeot is called Pidgeotto, and during the laboratory sequence, Team Rocket refers to a Scyther as Alakazam and to a Sandslash as Sandshrew. They're telling signs of how rushed this first Western adaptation was, working on material that nobody at the time expected to last more than two or three years.

Two films in one: what the Japanese version adds

The film French audiences saw in 2000 isn't quite the one released in Japan. The Western adaptation cut a large part of the prologue, which showed Mewtwo's childhood, his encounter with the clone of a little girl and the deaths of the other test subjects before his eyes. All that remains is the scene where the genetic material is discovered, with an entirely rewritten voiceover.

The dialogue was heavily reworked too. In the Japanese version, the film revolves around questions that are never answered — who am I, why was I created, what am I compared to Mew. The Western version replaces them with an explicit moral about true strength coming from the heart, and turns Mewtwo into a would-be world conqueror, in other words a more conventional villain.

The soundtrack got the same treatment. The Japanese score leaves plenty of silence between cues; the international version was largely re-scored and fills the space, to the point of swapping the battle music for a pop song during the fight between the Pokémon and their clones. The mood of the film changes noticeably as a result.

An extended Japanese version, known as the kanzenban, was broadcast on television as early as July 1999, with the full prologue and new sequences. The film was also rebroadcast in high definition on TV Tokyo on May 3, 2013, fifteen years after its release, to help promote the saga's sixteenth film.

📺 Between the Western cut released in France and the Japanese kanzenban aired with its full prologue, you have enough for an evening spent comparing the same film twice: your couch deserves a Pokémon throw blanket.

Production and music

The film's credits set the template for the saga's entire first decade. Kunihiko Yuyama directs, studio OLM animates, Toho distributes in Japan and Shinji Miyazaki composes the original score. The screenplay is by Takeshi Shudō, the man then writing most of the TV series. The feature runs 75 minutes.

This Yuyama–OLM–Toho–Miyazaki quartet would stay in place film after film, giving the period a very recognizable visual and musical consistency. It's one of the reasons the first four films look so alike in terms of craft, despite very different plots.

For the Western release, an entirely separate music team was assembled around John Loeffler, with orchestrations handled notably by Ralph Schuckett. The international opening credits reuse the series' theme song, and the end credits string together tracks by pop artists of the day, including Christina Aguilera. It was a deliberate strategy: selling the film as a musical event as much as a cartoon.

That choice partly explains the gap in perception between the two versions. The Japanese film is an animated drama; the Western film is a piece of family entertainment, and the two cuts tell rather different stories with the same images.

Lukewarm reviews, a commercial smash

The Western press wasn't kind. Critics pointed to the uneven animation, the dub's tacked-on moral and, in hindsight, the removal of the original version's ethical stakes. Yet the film topped the North American box office from its opening weekend, in November 1999, without the slightest critical support.

The numbers show the scale of the phenomenon. In Japan, the film finished as the second-biggest Japanese film of 1998, with distribution revenue (配給収入) of 4.15 billion yen, the only statistic Japan published before 2000. The gross box-office takings, reconstructed after the fact, come to 7.24 billion yen, 74% more: a peak the saga has never reached again. In North America, it grossed $85.7 million, plus another $77.9 million recorded in other territories by Box Office Mojo, for a total of $163.6 million, the figure this guide uses — The Numbers publishes the same one. The $172.7 million figure you'll also come across is JP Box-Office's, which credits the rest of the world with $87 million where Box Office Mojo counts $77.9 million: the $9.1 million gap lies entirely in the international figures. No profitability ratio can be calculated, since no budget has ever been established.

The success carried on well beyond theaters. The film sold ten million units on home video in the United States, including 4.2 million tapes sold in 2000 alone. For exported Japanese animation, that level of distribution would remain unmatched for a long time.

One figure sums it all up: for more than twenty-five years, the film held the U.S. box-office record for a Japanese animated film. Its $85.7 million wasn't surpassed until 2025, by Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle, which brought its North American total to $136,950,340.

The French release: April 5, 2000

In France, the film arrived nearly two years after Japan, on April 5, 2000, distributed by Warner Bros. It kicked off the trio of feature films released in French theaters — the other two being the second film, on December 20, 2000, and the third, on June 13, 2001 — followed by sixteen years away from the French big screen. After June 2001, France switched to DVD, then television, then streaming, and no Pokémon film has had a conventional theatrical run there since: the saga only returned to French screens for the limited release of I Choose You!, from November 5 to 17, 2017, and then for the special event screenings of Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel, on November 22 and 23, 2025.

The theatrical program wasn't limited to the feature film. The French screening lasted about an hour and thirty-five minutes, because it paired the short film Pikachu's Vacation with the 75 minutes of the film itself. That was the original Japanese format, carried over as is.

The result is spectacular and deserves to be spelled out in black and white: 2,224,432 admissions in France. To this day, that total makes it the most-watched Japanese film ever in French theaters, ahead of all the Japanese animation exported since. No other Pokémon film has ever come close.

The home video release followed in November 2000, on DVD and VHS. The French editions came with a promotional Mewtwo card, an item now sought after by collectors and typical of an era when the film and the trading card game fed each other's sales.

What the film left behind

In narrative terms, Pokémon: The First Movie set a formula that would hold for more than twenty years: one feature film a year, a rare Pokémon in the spotlight, and stakes that go beyond the scope of Ash's journey. The 22 films that followed fit this mold, with variations detailed in our overview of the 23 feature films.

In terms of tone, however, it has remained one of a kind. No other film in the saga has gone as far in dealing with death and the manufacture of life, and the franchise quickly course-corrected toward a lighter tone from the second film onward.

Mewtwo, for his part, became a recurring figure in Pokémon culture far beyond the film: he returns in a special episode, in the fighting games and in the cards, and his story was retold in full in CGI by the saga's twenty-second film, in 2019. That remake tells the same story and shouldn't be confused with the 1998 original, whose shots it reproduces one for one using an entirely different technique.

Finally, this film served as a gateway for an entire generation. Many adults who buy figures for their kids today discovered Pokémon in a darkened movie theater in the spring of 2000, between the first game Red and Blue — which had arrived in France a few months earlier — and the cards flooding school playgrounds.

🍱 You may have first met Mewtwo in a darkened theater in the spring of 2000; if you're packing a school bag in the morning, a Pokémon snack box tucked inside passes the torch to the next generation.

Pokémon: The First Movie at a glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• Is the first Pokémon movie called Mewtwo Strikes Back?
  Not in France. The official French title of the first feature film is Pokémon: Le film (Pokémon: The First Movie). Mewtwo contre-attaque (Mewtwo Strikes Back) is the translation of the Japanese subtitle, and it didn't appear in the title of the 2000 French theatrical release. You sometimes see it used as an alternative title, but it isn't the official one.
• When was the first Pokémon movie released in France?
  It opened in French theaters on April 5, 2000, nearly two years after its Japanese release on July 18, 1998. The French home video edition, on DVD and VHS, followed in November 2000.
• How many tickets did the first Pokémon movie sell in France?
  It drew 2,224,432 moviegoers to French theaters. That's the best result ever recorded by a Japanese film in France, across all genres, and by far the best score of the Pokémon saga in the country.
• Why is the first Pokémon movie considered the darkest in the saga?
  Because it tackles death, cloning and rejection head-on, through a Mewtwo trying to understand why he was created. Its screenwriter, Takeshi Shudō, wanted to give the franchise a more adult dimension, and he got his script approved while the studio was dealing with the crisis caused by the anime's suspension.
• What's the difference between the Japanese and French versions of the film?
  The Western adaptation removed most of the prologue devoted to Mewtwo's childhood, rewrote the dialogue to tone down its violence, replaced much of the music and added an explicit moral that isn't in the original. The Japanese version, by contrast, leaves Mewtwo's existential questions unanswered.
• Should this film be confused with 2019's Mewtwo Strikes Back—Evolution?
  No. The 2019 film is a full remake of the first one, made in CGI. It tells the same story and reproduces many shots one for one, but it's a separate feature film, the twenty-second in the saga, with an entirely different animation technique.
• Which short film was shown with the movie in theaters?
  Pikachu's Vacation, a dialogue-free short centered on Pokémon on vacation. It played before the main feature, bringing the total length of the French program to about an hour and thirty-five minutes. This short isn't a film in the saga: it doesn't count toward the 23 feature films.

In short