Pokémon Movies: All 23 Films in Order

Twenty-three feature films in twenty-two years, with a twenty-fourth announced for 2027: the Pokémon movie saga is one of the longest in Japanese animation, and one of the least known in France. Nearly every summer, a new movie opened in Japanese theaters with its star creature on the poster. In France, only three of them ever got a real theatrical run; the others arrived on DVD, then on television, then on streaming, sometimes almost six years later and not always in order. This page tells the whole story: the 23 movies one by one, their Japanese and French release dates, the forgotten short films, what the movies earned, who makes them, and where to watch them today.

Exactly how many Pokémon movies are there?

The short answer is 23 feature films. The first, Pokémon: The First Movie, opened in Japan on July 18, 1998; the twenty-third, Secrets of the Jungle, on December 25, 2020. Between the two, the saga never skipped a year. The figure is the one used by The Pokémon Company International, which writes on the "About Us" page of its corporate site: "there are also 23 animated Pokémon movies as of 2022". Poképédia gives the same total in French: "there are 23 Pokémon movies". As of September 3, 2026, it hasn't moved.

And yet the official French site shows 24 thumbnails on its page devoted to the movies. The gap comes down to a single title: the fourteenth movie was released in Japan in two versions on the same day, White - Victini and Zekrom to Black - Victini and Reshiram, and the French page gives each of them its own thumbnail where the Japanese site makes them a single entry. Depending on whether you split those two versions or not, the official total reads 23 or 24, and both figures live side by side in the franchise's own communications - sometimes in the same sentence.

What The Pokémon Company calls a "Pokémon movie"

The label works like a badge, not a genre. The only official sentence that gives a number qualifies just one word, animated : it counts animated feature films, and says nothing about the studio or the characters. The detailed definition quoted everywhere actually comes from Poképédia, which presents it as The Pokémon Company's usage without citing a source: an animated feature film set in the world of Pokémon the Series, with Ash and Pikachu, running more than an hour, and produced "generally speaking" by Tsukasa Koitabashi's team at the Japanese studio OLM.

That "generally speaking" is not a stylistic hedge: four animation teams have followed one another across the 23 movies. What stays constant is the studio, OLM, not the team - a consistency that describes the saga without defining it.

The definition leaves out three families of works. Pokémon Detective Pikachu, released in theaters in Japan but shot in live action, has not been erased from the movies page of the official Japanese site: it is filed there under a neighboring heading called "the other movies." The ten short films that opened the screenings, for their part, appear in the same list as the features: only their running time sets them apart. Finally, series and long-form productions made for television or streaming stay out of the count, whatever their running time. A whole section goes through these three exclusions.

A definition that 2027 will make obsolete

On August 30, 2026, The Pokémon Company announced Pokémon: Wild Card, an animated feature film slated for 2027: no OLM, no Ash, no parent season. Not one of the criteria that describe the 23 existing movies fits it, and no official source gives it a place in the sequence.

The TV series belongs to another page: the season guide covers them one by one, and the overview of Pokémon on screen puts the movies back in the wider picture.

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1998-2002: Mewtwo, Lugia, and the first five feature films

The first five feature films fit into five consecutive summers, from July 18, 1998 to July 13, 2002. It is the most consistent block in the saga: Kunihiko Yuyama directs all five, the OLM studio makes them, Toho distributes them in Japan, Shinji Miyazaki scores them, and Hisao Shirai handles the cinematography. It is also the only block French audiences ever saw on a movie screen.

The first feature film opened on July 18, 1998, three months and two days after the return of a series that episode 38 had kept off the air for four months - the December 1997 incident is told in the article devoted to the first season of the anime. The calendar still bears the mark: the movie came out between episodes 54 and 55 while its story takes place after episode 65, the one where Mewtwo escapes from Team Rocket headquarters. Screenwriter Takeshi Shudo said so himself: the ten-minute prologue was not planned, it was added once it became clear that the hiatus would make it impossible to introduce Mewtwo on television before the release. The movie that came out of it is about cloning, parentage, and death.

That prologue is precisely what the West cut, and the paradox is documented. The Japanese extended version, the kanzenban broadcast on television on July 8, 1999, takes the movie from 75 to 85 minutes and the prologue from ten to twenty, adding to it a segment drawn from the radio drama Mewtwo no Tanjo ; this extended version had been assembled for the American release, and it is the North American version of November 10, 1999 that took the segment back out. The article on the first movie details what each of these versions contains.

A year later, July 17, 1999, Pokémon: The Movie 2000 - The Power of One takes the opposite tack from the closed world of New Island: the collector Lawrence III captures Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres to draw Lugia out, throws the planet's climate off balance, and Ash has to bring back the three islands' orbs to restore the balance. At 82 minutes, it is the longest of the first four movies.

The July 8, 2000, the third movie comes back down to a child's eye level. Molly Hale, whose father vanished during a dig, wakes the Unown: they crystallize the town of Greenfield and build her a father in the shape ofEntei, who kidnaps Ash's mother to complete the family. It is the last movie written by Takeshi Shudo, ill by then, who afterwards stepped away from writing the feature films; it is also the first in the franchise to have its premiere in an IMAX theater.

The fourth, released in Japan on July 7, 2001, sends a young Trainer named Sammy forty years into the future, whom Celebi snatches away from a Team Rocket hunter and whom Ash helps without knowing who he will become. Hideki Sonoda writes his first solo script for the saga here. Above all, it is the first Pokémon movie denied a French theatrical release : it only reached France on May 16, 2007, in a three-DVD box set put out by TF1 Vidéo, five years and ten months after Japan.

The July 13, 2002, Pokémon Heroes closes the cycle in Alto Mare, a canal city drawn after Venice, where two spies covet the Soul Dew and its guardians Latias and Latios. The practice of location scouting abroad starts with this movie and never stopped afterwards. Its score is co-credited to Shinji Miyazaki and accordionist coba - English Wikipedia makes it the only one of the first eight movies to share its music, while the Japanese credits also list Hirokazu Tanaka alongside Miyazaki on the first two. Pokémon Heroes is also the first movie to show the permanent death of a Pokémon, and it marks the last appearance of Misty in a feature film - Brock, for his part, stays at Ash's side through the thirteenth movie. The article devoted to this movie takes a closer look at its setting and its Eon duo. In France, it went straight to DVD on July 13, 2005.

Only three of these five movies ever played in a French theater, from April 5, 2000 to June 13, 2001, under the Warner Bros. France banner, with every screening preceded by a Pikachu short film. No Pokémon feature film has had a commercial run in a French cinema since : the puzzle of the French releases tells the rest of the story, admissions included.

One last caveat, about running times: three different figures circulate for the same title - the movie alone, the French program with the short film included, whose the section on the short films breaks down the math, and the PAL DVD, which shortens the movie by roughly another 4%.

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Advanced Generation: four Mythical Pokémon for four summers

Between 2003 and 2006, the saga switched eras without changing its rhythm. Starting with the sixth feature film, the Japanese title opened with a new label, アドバンスジェネレーション, Advanced Generation, just as the games Ruby and Sapphire had relaunched the franchise two years earlier. Four movies make up this block, and their Japanese release dates fit inside five calendar days: July 19, 2003, July 17, 2004, July 16, 2005 and July 15, 2006. Vocabulary trap: the movie era is called Advanced Generation, while the season that opens it is simply "Advanced".

The casting rule here is stricter than anywhere else in the saga: one Mythical Pokémon on each of the four posters — Jirachi (#385), Deoxys (#386), Mew, then Manaphy (#490) — flanked by a Hoenn Legendary: Groudon, Rayquaza, the Regirock-Regice-Registeel trio, and finally Kyogre. The exception says a lot: on the eighth movie's poster, the star is not the Mythical Pokémon but Lucario, who is neither Legendary nor Mythical. This movie brings four fourth-generation creatures to the screen — Lucario, Bonsly, Mime Jr. and Weavile — before the release of the games Diamond and Pearl ; the ninth does it again with Manaphy, number 490 in a Pokédex that stopped at 386 at the time.

The second constant of the block is human. Brock, May and Max travel with Ash Ketchum in all four movies, without a single substitution : no other lineup in the saga holds for four feature films in a row. The ninth movie is the quartet's last outing together on the big screen: at the end of season 9, May leaves for Johto and Max for Petalburg City, and only Brock takes to the road again with Ash Ketchum.

The third constant, the human antagonist, only half holds up. It applies to the sixth movie, with the magician Butler, a former Team Magma member, and to the ninth, with the pirate captain Phantom. Destiny Deoxys by contrast has no human antagonist : the conflict there plays out between two Deoxys, a Rayquaza and the safety of an automated city. What they all share is a vacation setting kept apart from the journey underway — the Forina valley, the robotic city of LaRousse City, the kingdom of Rota, and finally a Johto sea. Three of them are modeled on real places — Vancouver, Neuschwanstein Castle, the Italy of Rome and Capri; for the sixth movie's valley, no documented model.

Two titles stand apart. Lucario and the Mystery of Mew is the only one of the first eight movies rated PG-12 in Japan, while the other seven are rated "G"; it runs 101 minutes, one minute longer than the seventh according to the English Wikipedia — the eiga.com entry cited below gives 101 minutes to both, which ties them. Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea is, for its part, the only animated movie in the franchise built on the concepts of a spin-off game : the temple, the Sea Crown and Manaphy's bond with the shrine come from the game Pokémon Ranger. It is also the only movie of the Ruby and Sapphire era set in Johto, the only one whose poster does not use the usual Pokémon logo, and the longest in the saga, at 105 minutes.

The block France received last

Seen from France, these four movies are the low point of the entire saga. None of them ever played in theaters, and the first two arrived on May 16, 2007, the same day as the fourth, in the three-disc box set released by TF1 Vidéo. The delay reaches 1,397 days for the sixth movie, nearly three years and ten months, and 1,033 days for the seventh.

That box set also explains the most audible dubbing mishap in the saga: sent to MediaDub International, away from the usual Belgian team, the three movies were still not dubbed together there — the fourth and seventh share a cast, the sixth has a third one — and the Pokémon call out their names in English.

The last two movies of the block, for their part, did not arrive on disc, contrary to what you often read. The ninth movie aired on Jetix on December 24, 2007, eight days before the eighth, on January 1, 2008 ; the DVDs only followed on April 9, 2008 for the eighth and June 18 for the ninth. The French order therefore flips a second time before straightening out. Across the four movies, the gap with Japan shrinks before your eyes: 1,397 days, then 1,033, then 899, then 527.

One last trait closes the block on the Japanese side: the sixth movie, Jirachi Wish Maker, is the last one to have been shown with a Pikachu short before the feature, before a nine-year break. Its French title, for that matter, has no single form. Poképédia, whose template lists the 23 official titles, writes Jirachi Wish Maker with no prefix ; the French DVD covers read Pokémon - Jirachi, le génie des voeux ; our blog articles, like Wikipedia, write Pokémon: Jirachi Wish Maker.

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Diamond and Pearl: the Sinnoh trilogy, and the odd one out, Zoroark

Four feature films in four summers, all turned toward Sinnoh: Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai (Japan, July 14, 2007), Pokémon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior (July 19, 2008), Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life (July 18, 2009) and Pokémon - Zoroark: Master of Illusions (July 10, 2010). Brock and Dawn travel with Ash Ketchum in all four, one movie per season from season 10 to season 13. The first three form the only binding narrative chain among the twenty-three movies ; the fourth is not part of it, and that is what makes it interesting.

The Sinnoh trilogy, link by link

The tenth movie sets two deities against each other above Alamos Town: Dialga, master of time, and Palkia, master of space. It is the only movie of the Diamond and Pearl era with no human antagonist — the threat there is a cosmic accident, and Darkrai, #491 in the National Pokédex, is a wrongly accused Mythical Pokémon making its very first animated appearance. The article devoted to this tenth movie recounts the Alamos Town affair.

The eleventh does not begin somewhere else: it begins in the wreckage. The Reverse World, a mirror dimension of our own, was ravaged by that same battle, and its master Giratina (#487) holds Dialga responsible. The link is not merely implied, it is shown on screen : Poképédia notes that this is the only Pokémon feature film to insert a flashback taken from another movie, and Bulbapedia specifies that the Dialga seen here is the same individual as the one from Alamos Town — a first from one movie to the next. The article on Giratina and the Sky Warrior follows that thread.

The twelfth closes the loop, and it had been announced a year in advance: in July 2008, at the end of the previous movie's credits, a teaser showed Giratina, Dialga and Palkia about to clash above ruins evoking the Spear Pillar. It brings the three dragons together for the first time, brings back supporting characters from the two earlier installments and sends Ash Ketchum himself into the past, a first for the Trainer. The driving device of all three movies stays the same — an accusation aimed at the wrong culprit — as pointed out by the article on Arceus and the Jewel of Life.

Be careful not to confuse two neighboring claims. Poképédia says of the eleventh movie that it is the only one to quote another movie in a flashback ; Bulbapedia says it is the first to be a sequel to another movie, setting aside Mewtwo Returns, a special episode and not a feature film. "First" is not "only": the twelfth is a sequel too. And the end-credits teaser is no mark of a trilogy: the thirteenth would announce the fourteenth the same way, with no plot connection.

Zoroark, the odd one out of the block

The habit of showing a creature in theaters before the games starts neither with it nor with this block — it is as old as the saga — but the eleventh movie already practices it: Giratina's Origin Forme and Shaymin's Sky Forme appear on screen before their debut in Pokémon Platinum. The thirteenth movie pushes the device a whole generation further : Zorua (#570) and Zoroark (#571) are fifth-generation Pokémon slipped into a fourth-generation movie, and Bulbapedia sees in them the only appearance of a fifth-generation species in the animated series before the fourteenth season, Black & White.

The dates show just how much of a head start that is. In Japan, the movie came out on July 10, 2010 and Pokémon Black and White Versions on September 18 that same year: ten weeks ahead, with an ad for the games screened before the feature, which revealed Patrat along the way. In the West, the margin is a very different one: the games reached Europe on March 4, 2011 and France saw the movie on February 20, twelve days earlier.

Beyond that, this thirteenth movie is the only one of the Diamond and Pearl era that stands alone, and the only one whose poster does not carry a deity from the Sinnoh myth. It lines up three different trios of Legendary beasts — the ones built by Grings Kodai's machines, the ones produced by Zoroark's illusions, and the Shiny ones of Crown City: this is the first time Raikou, Entei and Suicune appear together in the animated series, and the first appearance of a Shiny Legendary on screen.

The moment France stops waiting

This block is where the format changes: after four movies discovered on DVD and two shown on Jetix around the turn of 2008, it is with these four movies that television becomes the rule. Poképédia dates the four first French broadcasts to August 10, 2008, March 10, 2009, December 3, 2009 and February 20, 2011.

The gap with Japan collapses at the same time, from thirteen months for Darkrai to less than five for Arceus — whose French DVD of December 11, 2009 came a week before the Japanese DVD of December 18, a unique case for the period. Zoroark pushes the counter back up to seven months, but France sees it before it can buy the games it announces.

Two of those four dates are disputed, as it happens. For The Rise of Darkrai, Poképédia gives August 10, 2008, Planète Jeunesse November 5, 2008 on Jetix ; the movie had in any case been screened at Japan Expo, from July 3 to 6, 2008. For Arceus and the Jewel of Life, Poképédia's infobox gives December 3, 2009, while the body of the same page and Planète Jeunesse settle on October 6, 2010 on Disney XD, ten months after the French DVD.

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Black and White: the only Pokémon movie released in two versions

Three feature films across three summers, all distributed in Japan by Toho: July 16, 2011, July 14, 2012, and July 13, 2013. The Black and White era is the only one where Ash goes to the movies with Iris and Cilan, and these are the first movies in the series where Brock doesn't appear at all.

The fourteenth movie is the most unusual experiment of the twenty-three: two versions were released the same day in Japanese theaters, Pokémon the Movie: Black - Victini and Reshiram to Pokémon the Movie: White - Victini and Zekrom. The idea comes from the games, which have come out in pairs since the first generation and don't hold the same creatures — a mechanic detailed in our video game overview. In theaters, the math was the same: a moviegoer could buy two tickets.

Each version runs about 95 minutes and tells the same story, in the same settings. What differs fits into a finite list, which Bulbapedia catalogs scene by scene:

• the dragon : Ash sides with Reshiram in Black, with Zekrom in White, and Damon uses the other one;
• Damon himself, whose look changes, along with his Pokémon — Reuniclus in White, Gothitelle in Black — and the landscape he crosses, a desert in White, a frozen plain in Black ;
• the opening : Pikachu battles a Throh in White and a Sawk in Black ; the group then takes the left fork in White, the right one in Black ;
• the Shiny Pokémon : Carlita's Hydreigon in White, the Golurk of Roilita, mother of Damon and Carlita, in Black ;
• the music, which doesn't even have the same composer: Shinji Miyazaki scored Black, Akifumi Tada and Kazuhiko Sawaguchi scored White, with two different ending songs;
• a few shots moved around : a conversation played in daylight in White and at night in Black, scenes flipped in mirror image, short passages that exist on only one side.

Victini, for his part, never switches sides, and neither does the plot. Added together, the two versions give 34 species their debut, more than any other feature film in the series. Combined, they earned 4.33 billion yen in Japan, the second-best result for a Japanese film in 2011. In France, they arrived together on April 18, 2012 on Disney XD, then on June 6, 2012 on DVD and Blu-ray — the first Pokémon product released on that format in the country. None of the other twenty-two movies has ever been split in two like this, and the feature devoted to this double release breaks down how it worked.

The fifteenth movie, Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice, returns to a single release on July 14, 2012: Keldeo wants to earn recognition from Cobalion, Terrakion, and Virizion, and takes on Kyurem to get it. Gulli aired it on February 26, 2013, and the French DVD came out on August 21 of that year. It is the shortest movie in the series, at 72 minutes — sources don't agree on the exact figure.

That same July 14, 2012 also marks a quiet return: a short film once again precedes the feature in Japan, nine years after the last one.

The sixteenth, fittingly, closes the cycle on July 13, 2013. Genesect and the Legend Awakened brings Mewtwo back to the big screen fifteen years after the first feature film of July 18, 1998 — but it isn't the same Mewtwo: Bulbapedia reports that an appearance by the original one was planned, then dropped for legal reasons tied to the estate of Takeshi Shudo. The movie also shows the first Mega Evolution seen in a feature film, that of Mega Mewtwo Y, three months before the release of Pokémon X and Y on October 12, 2013; the very first shot, however, belongs to the special episode Mewtwo - Prologue to Awakening, as pointed out by our guide to Mega Evolutions.

This movie holds the series' speed record: three months between the Japanese release and the English-language release, and an American DVD out on December 3, 2013, two weeks before the Japanese DVD. The French date, though, isn't settled: Poképédia gives October 22, 2013 on Gulli, while Bulbapedia lists France among the countries that aired it on October 19, at the same time as the United States. In three years, the French wait went from nine months down to three. It is also the last movie to carry the Japanese "PIKACHU THE MOVIE" branding, in place since 1998.

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XY: three creatures revealed in theaters before the games

Three movies, three summers in a row, a single region: Kalos. The 17th feature film comes out in Japan on July 19, 2014, the 18th on July 18, 2015, the 19th on July 16, 2016; all three are directed by Kunihiko Yuyama, distributed by Toho, and run 77, 78, and 95 minutes. It is the block richest in rare creatures in the whole series : each one puts a Mythical Pokémon on the poster, and each one hands it to players as an event gift in the sixth-generation games.

Diancie and the Cocoon of Destruction opens the cycle by placing a mineral princess between Xerneas and Yveltal, the region's two mascots. It lines up four human antagonists, the most in the entire series, and serves as a showcase for the Mega Evolution introduced by the games a year earlier: five Mega forms parade through the opening sequence alone, six more in the end credits. The way the series works in France shows through here: Diancie was given to players as early as fall 2014, while the movie didn't reach French television until March 10, 2015. The creature arrived before its own movie.

Hoopa and the Clash of Ages pushes the idea to a record. Bulbapedia counts thirteen Legendary Pokémon on screen, more than in any other movie in the series : Hoopa, a Mythical Pokémon with two forms — Confined and Unbound —, opens rings through which the entire pantheon pours in, until the pile-up tears space-time apart and becomes the heart of the plot.

The movie holds a second record, a less visible one: eight event Pokémon distributed around a single title, the most in the series according to Poképédia. Among them is a preorder Arceus offered in nineteen variants, one of them Shiny — a first, since the species is normally impossible to obtain in that form — and six Legendary Pokémon of your choice to transfer by infrared. English-language critics gave the movie the cold shoulder; in a poll on the official Pokémon site, in February 2021, fans voted it the most popular of the three XY-era movies.

Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel closes the cycle on a one-of-a-kind case: it is the first movie in the series where more than one Mythical Pokémon takes the lead. Volcanion, the only Fire and Water type Pokémon, drags along behind it a Magearna that isn't from the same generation as the rest of the cast: it belongs to the seventh, and appears on screen on July 16, 2016, four months before the release of Pokémon Sun and Moon (November 18, 2016 in Japan, November 23 in Europe). Its Ability, Soul-Heart, shares its name with the object everyone is after in the movie and with the French end-credits song.

This cycle is also the low point of the series' Japanese box office : 2.91 then 2.61 then 2.15 billion yen, three drops in a row, and the lowest Japanese gross for a Pokémon movie until the pandemic. The 19th movie opens at No. 4 on the Japanese chart with 323,901,600 yen, 366 screens, and 289,971 admissions in its first weekend, which the English Wikipedia presents as the second-weakest opening in the series.

In France, the XY cycle went through television and nothing else — until a late return. Volcanion aired on November 11, 2016 on Canal J, then on November 18, 2016 on Gulli, without ever getting a French DVD edition. Nine years later, it came back to the big screen: on November 22 and 23, 2025, in special event screenings. AlloCiné lists the event under the title "Pokémon au Cinéma," distributor Alileo Media Limited, exhibition permit 2025006437, listed running time 1 hr 41 min — six minutes more than the movie alone, the gap most likely corresponding to the previously unaired episode of Pokétoon, "Kangaskhan to the Rescue," screened alongside it. It is the only Pokémon movie to return to a French theater since I Choose You! in November 2017.

The event itself is poorly documented: the official pokemon.fr site cites three chains — MK2, CGR, and Kinepolis — where the press release picked up by the media named only two, and it speaks of the "weekend of November 22, 2025" when the press writes "22 and 23."

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I Choose You!: the reboot and the alternate continuity

On July 15, 2017, for the anime's twentieth anniversary, Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! revisits Ash's very first morning — the missed alarm, Professor Oak's lab, the Pikachu that refuses its Poké Ball, the flock of Spearow — then branches off into a story the series never told, that of the Rainbow Wing left behind by Ho-Oh. The title is that of the very first episode from 1997, and it is the first feature film in the series whose Japanese title doesn't contain the name of a single Pokémon. Neither Misty nor Brock comes along: two new Trainers, Verity and Sorrel, take their place, and the longtime companions come back only as silhouettes in the end credits.

The break isn't only about the cast. The movie shows Ash catching Pokémon on screen for the first time, his Pokémon evolving for the first time, and his Charmander, now a Charizard, keeps obeying him — whereas the series turns it into a rebel for dozens of episodes. Director Kunihiko Yuyama explained in July 2017 that he wanted to weave "parallel elements" into this retelling of the origins rather than remake episode 1; in Japan, the movie is described as a parallel universe that branches off from that first episode. The nineteen previous feature films slotted in between two episodes of the ongoing season without changing anything: this one is the first to step outside that frame.

This branching opens what Poképédia calls an alternate continuity, which covers three movies, numbers 20, 21, and 23 ; the section on the two continuities details its scope and the fourth link in the chain, which is not a film.

On July 13, 2018, Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us opened in 364 Japanese theaters — the first Friday opening in the saga, the previous twenty films having all opened on a Saturday. It pushes the break from the series further than its predecessor. The story is an ensemble piece, carried by five brand-new human characters — Risa, Callahan, Toren, Harriet and Margo — brought together by Fula City's Wind Festival. Ash is only one protagonist among several, and Pikachu remains his only known Pokémon for the whole film.

Two more firsts follow from that. The region where the film takes place has never been confirmed, which had never happened before, and none of Ash's friends from the series appears in it. For the first time, the trio of Jessie, James and Meowth is directly responsible for the conflict: the toxic cloud that threatens the festival is their doing, without their meaning it, where until then they had served as comic relief or unexpected backup. Team Rocket, for its part, had already supplied the main antagonist of the first and fourth films. Lugia, who shares the poster with the Mythical Zeraora, makes its third feature-film appearance here, after films 2 and 18.

A year later, on July 12, 2019, the saga did what it had never done before: it remade itself. Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution restages the 1998 film entirely in computer animation. It is the only feature in the saga made entirely by computer ; its credits sequence changes form to match.

The phrase "shot-for-shot remake" is convenient, but it earns its "or nearly so." The film builds on the version known as Kanzenban from 1998 and rewrites neither its plot nor its ending, but it adds an entire scene — Giovanni introducing Mewtwo to an army of Team Rocket grunts —, cuts others, including the battle at the Viridian City Gym, redesigns the laboratory, Mewtwo's armor and several characters, and fixes a 1998 mistake along the way by replacing Raymond's Golem with a Drowzee, which a Thunderbolt can legitimately knock out. One sequence promised during the promotional campaign, the young Mewtwo surrounded by dying clones, was ultimately never adapted.

The twenty-third and final installment, Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle, tells the story of Koko, a child taken in as a baby on a riverbank and raised by a Zarude who left his troop for him. Ten years later, the child believes he is a Pokémon himself; the arrival of Ash, then of a Biotope Company team led by Dr. Zed, forces him to face what he really is. It is the first film in the saga without a single Legendary Pokémon, and the first in which a human uses a Pokémon move, with Koko unleashing Jungle Healing.

Above all, it is the only one of the twenty-three films that did not open in July in Japan, and the reason can be dated to the day. Announced on January 10, 2020 for the following July 10, in keeping with the summer ritual, it saw its release pushed back on May 13, 2020, with no new date, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In June, the production announced winter; in August, a trailer finally set December 25, 2020. The delay carried a narrative cost — on the original date, the film would have given Cinderace and Greedent their debuts in the animated series — and a commercial one: the Japanese state of emergency declared in January 2021, two weeks after release, hit the theatrical run right at its heart, and the film posted the lowest Japanese box office of the entire saga.

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All 23 Pokémon Movies in Order, from Japan to France

Here is this page's reference table: the twenty-three features in their Japanese release order, with the first date a French viewer could watch them, on any format. Each title links to its full feature; it is given without the "Pokémon the Movie:" prefix whenever that would weigh the line down.

Sorted on the French column, the same table gives a different order: 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6 and 7 tied, 9, 8, then the rest without a hitch. Nine of these films reached France through television, five through DVD, four through a streaming platform, three through a theater and two through a Japan Expo screening.

Five rows carry a disagreement between sources on the first French date: films 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13.

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The Puzzle of the French Releases

Three. That is the number of Pokémon features that ever got a continuous commercial run in French theaters, meaning a theatrical release held over several weeks: the first film on April 5, 2000, the second on December 20, 2000, the third on June 13, 2001. Fourteen months, and then nothing. The other twenty films reached France through DVD, through television, then through streaming platforms. Five theatrical appearances did happen after 2001, two of them for the twentieth film alone, but those were one- to four-day events, never real runs.

The turning point can be counted: French admissions fell nearly fourteenfold in fourteen months, from 2,224,432 admissions to 160,401 — 162,861 by a competing count, within 1.5%. No source consulted documents the decision to stop theatrical releases; the collapse in admissions is the context, not the established cause. The first film, for its part, has never been caught: as of September 3, 2026, it remains the most-watched Japanese film in French theaters, ahead of Demon Slayer - Infinity Castle and its 1,759,440 admissions since September 17, 2025.

Five Successive Eras, Five Publishers

The first era is the theatrical one, and it lasts only from 2000 to 2001: Warner Bros. distributed the first three films in theaters, Warner Home Video then released them on VHS and DVD, each box packaged with a collectible card. The second era is the one of the DVD with no prior screen release, neither theatrical nor television : Pokémon Heroes came out on July 13, 2005 from Buena Vista, the only film in the franchise distributed in France by Disney, then the Les Aventures des Pokémon box set from TF1 Vidéo delivered the fourth, sixth and seventh films all at once, on May 16, 2007.

The third era is a television one, and it lasts ten years. France Télévisions took over the adaptation rights from the eighth film onward and handled the video releases up to the eighteenth, but from then on television got first crack: Canal+ for the first two films, on January 8 and June 29, 2002, then Jetix for films 8 to 11, Disney XD for films 12 to 14, Gulli for films 15 to 17 and Canal J for films 19 and 20 — the eighteenth escaping the rule, arriving first as a digital purchase in January 2016. Jetix, for that matter, was never replaced by a competitor: it was renamed Disney XD on April 1, 2009. And no Pokémon film has ever had its French premiere on a major general-audience channel — TF1, which held the rights to the TV series and released the 2007 box set, never aired a feature first.

The fourth era is the one of digital purchase, and it begins with Hoopa and the Clash of Ages, offered for purchase and rental on Google Play and iTunes in mid-January 2016 — the 18th according to lesgrandsclassiques.fr, the 19th according to Poképédia. That same film is also the last Pokémon feature to get a first French DVD edition, on June 1, 2016. The Power of Us followed on December 11, 2018 on iTunes, with no theaters and no disc. The fifth era comes down to two Netflix dates: February 27, 2020 for Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution, and October 8, 2021 for Secrets of the Jungle. Since the twentieth film aired on Canal J on December 6, 2017, no French television premiere of a Pokémon film has been recorded.

A Scrambled Order, and a Film Seen Before Japan

The most visible consequence of these changes of hands is that France discovered the fifth film before the fourth. Pokémon Heroes came out on DVD on July 13, 2005; Pokémon 4Ever waited until May 16, 2007, 672 days later — one year and ten months, and not the "nearly two years" you often read. The explanation is an editorial one: TF1 still held the rights to films 4, 6 and 7 after dropping the series from its schedule, only to watch it go on to triumph on Gulli.

That May 16, 2007 is the densest date in the French timeline: three films arrived on the same day in the same box set, three years of Japanese production — 2001, 2003 and 2004 — delivered in a single day. Poképédia and Wikipédia date this box set to May 16, Planète Jeunesse to May 9; the disagreement is about a week, not about the fact.

Measured from the Japanese release to the first French date, the twenty-three gaps range from -9 to 2,139 days. The record goes to Pokémon 4Ever : 2,139 days, five years and ten months, from July 7, 2001 to May 16, 2007. The average, 493 days, is nearly double the median of 277 days: a handful of movies from the 2000s pulls the whole series upward, while one film in two was available in France in under nine months. At the other end of the scale, Genesect and the Legend Awakened holds the smallest positive gap in the saga, 101 days, thanks to its broadcast on Gulli on October 22, 2013. And Pokémon Heroes offers the cleanest coincidence: released in Japan on July 13, 2002, it reached France three years to the day later, on July 13, 2005.

That leaves the one case that resembles no other. Only one Pokémon movie was shown in France before it was shown in Japan : I Choose You! had its world premiere on Thursday, July 6, 2017, on the Yuzu stage at Japan Expo, in Japanese with subtitles and with director Kunihiko Yuyama in attendance — nine days before its Japanese release of July 15, 2017. The film came back in a French-dubbed version on November 5 and 6, 2017: two screenings at the Grand Rex on the 5th, Kinepolis theaters from the 6th. The "November 5 to 17, 2017" range you see quoted everywhere is not a run length: it is the window during which the ticket granted the QR code for the cap-wearing Pikachu and weighs Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

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Where to watch the Pokémon movies in France today

Looking for the Pokémon movies in France almost always leads to the same reflex, and it is the wrong one: Netflix has only two of them. As of September 3, 2026, seventeen of the twenty-three feature films can be watched for free on M6+, the M6 group's platform, with a free account and ad breaks. That figure alone makes M6+ the saga's leading free distributor in France; by number of titles, the Apple TV store goes furthest, but pay-per-title — and it appears on no official The Pokémon Company page.

The M6+ catalog lists eighteen programs for these seventeen movies : the fourteenth appears there in both of its versions. The rights are credited to Gulli, a channel in the same group, whose catch-up service has been absorbed: the old replay.gulli.fr address now redirects to the Gulli site. The current rights window began on February 1, 2026 and runs until July 15, 2027; six movies are missing from it, nos. 4, 5, 6, 7, 22 and 23.

Netflix France, for its part, has only two of the twenty-three movies as of September 3, 2026, the last two, added on February 27, 2020 and October 8, 2021; neither has ever been released any other way in France. If the saga is thought of as "being on Netflix," it is because the TV series really is there: the episodes covered by the page on the twenty-eight seasons of the anime do not follow the same contracts as the feature films.

For the six movies missing from M6+, per-title purchase and rental remain, at Apple TV as at Amazon Video. Watch out for the most widespread misunderstanding: none of the twenty-three feature films is included with an Amazon Prime subscription, even though the official French page lists amazon.fr among its distributors. One last access without a purchase exists and is never mentioned: SFR Play, which resells the same Gulli package.

The one movie with no legal offer at all in France

The saga has a hole, and it carries a number. Pokémon Heroes is the only one of the twenty-three feature films with no legal online offer in France as of September 3, 2026 : no free stream, no subscription, no purchase, no rental. This is not a listing oversight: the entry exists in the retail databases under its French title and returns three offers on the American market, but it is empty for France. The saga's fifth movie therefore no longer exists here except in physical form, and secondhand.

What shut down, and what is left of it

The free official channel, for its part, is gone. The Pokémon Company pulled its Pokémon TV app from every store on January 8, 2024, and the service shut down on March 28, 2024 : since that date, there has been no official Pokémon player where you can watch a feature film. Its heir is a YouTube channel, "Pokémon TV," opened on December 6, 2024, which posts full episodes with a French audio track among sixteen languages — but no movies. Three feature films were offered there temporarily in mid-2025; there were none as of September 3, 2026.

Physical media had stopped even earlier. Movies 1 through 18 got a French DVD edition; the next five, none. The only later releases are the October 2016 catch-up box sets, which contain nothing but movies already issued. Blu-ray never took off: the fourteenth movie is the only one of the twenty-three for which a French edition on that format could be found; the other box sets you come across in French are imported British editions.

The services where the saga is not

The list of absentees says as much as the list of those present. As of September 3, 2026, neither Crunchyroll, ADN, Max nor Disney+ carries a single Pokémon movie in France ; ADN's catalog even returns zero results for "pokemon." Paramount+, Canal+ and Apple TV+ — the subscription service, not to be confused with the Apple TV store — carry none either. The American free service Tubi did put five feature films online on July 7, 2026, but its catalog is unreachable from Europe. As for the free Pokémon channel launched by WildBrain in twenty-four territories since August 2024, none of its press releases mentions France.

That leaves theaters. No Pokémon movie screening is scheduled in France as of September 3, 2026. The last ones date back to November 22 and 23, 2025, two days of event screenings for Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel, nine years after Japan.

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The ten shorts screened before the features

Of the saga's twenty-three feature films, only ten were preceded in theaters by a short film. Bulbapedia gives the closed list, under the Japanese name for the practice, doji joei (同時上映, "simultaneous screening"): six shorts from 1998 to 2003, then four from 2012 to 2015, with a nine-year gap between the two blocks. Thirteen of the twenty-three movies therefore never had an opening short: movies 7 through 14, then movies 19 through 23. End to end, these ten shorts total 218 minutes, or 3 hours and 38 minutes of programming.

The count lends itself to three different readings, and that is the trap of the subject. Poképédia numbers eighteen shorts, Bulbapedia numbers twenty-seven: both lists mix theatrical shorts with Christmas specials, shorts shown aboard Japanese domestic flights and 3D screenings, of which none has ever accompanied a movie in theaters. Only the ten in the table below did.

Two halts, only one of them explained

The first halt never received a public explanation. Gotta Dance!! plays on July 19, 2003 with Jirachi Wish Maker ; the following summer, Destiny Deoxys comes out on its own, on July 17, 2004. The Japanese Wikipedia states both facts in the same sentence — from this film on and for eight years, the paired screening is dropped and the feature's running time grows longer — without explaining the decision. The numbers point the same way: the 6th film runs 81 minutes and the 7th 101 according to eiga.com, while the Japanese Wikipedia lists 80 and 99. The feature did absorb the short's slot, but that is a documented coincidence, not an established cause.

Nine years later, the practice resumes for four summers, from July 14, 2012 to July 18, 2015. Meloetta's Moonlight Serenade reopens the series under a title lifted from the English, where the Japanese speaks of a "sparkling recital" ; the last of them all, Pikachu and the Pokémon Music Squad, shows orchestra rehearsals interrupted again and again.

The second stop, on the other hand, is documented. The 19th film, Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel, comes out on its own on July 16, 2016, and its executive producer Junya Okamoto explains himself in the Japanese press on June 27, 2016. He makes three points: of the nineteen films released at the time, eight had no short and no rule governs those absences ; the team, after a short as experimental as the 2015 musical show, decided to "take a break"; and dropping the short lengthened the film by about twenty minutes. His count of eight leaves out the film he is promoting: mechanically, that makes nine. The break is still on: no short accompanied films 20 through 23, and nothing of the kind is announced for the 24th film, revealed on August 30, 2026.

What France saw, and what it never saw

Only three of those ten shorts played in theaters in France, in a French dub, with the three films of 2000 and 2001; June 13, 2001 closes the chapter : no Pikachu short has played in a French theater since. Camp Pikachu follows on July 13, 2005 as an extra on the French DVD of the 5th film, in English with French subtitles — the only one of the ten released here in its original version.

The three shorts of the second block got a French dub without ever reaching theaters, including Meloetta's Moonlight Serenade on February 25, 2013 on the Pokémon TV app, the only date our sources attest to only indirectly, and Pikachu, What's This Key? on November 4, 2017 on a platform Poképédia does not specify.

The count stops there. Three shorts have never been translated into European French : Pikachu's PikaBoo (2001), the longest of the ten at 24 minutes, Gotta Dance!! (2003), and Pikachu and the Pokémon Music Squad (2015), the shortest at 15 minutes. The 2003 case is unique in the franchise: the DVD released in Canada offers a Quebec French dub, while no European French version has ever existed. Poképédia makes it the only Pokémon work translated into French without ever having a European French dub.

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What Pokémon movies earned in Japan

The saga's twenty-three Japanese grosses add up to 90.71 billion yen, or 3.94 billion per film — a total no source publishes and that has to be rebuilt from the annual statistics of Eiren, the Japanese motion picture producers association. The two extremes span a ratio of 1 to 3.6: the first film, released on July 18, 1998, takes in 7.24 billion yen and remains a peak never reached again; Secrets of the Jungle, twenty-third and last, drops to 2.02 billion yen after its release was pushed back to the winter of 2020.

Three cycles, not one long fall

The idea of a continuous decline does not survive the year-by-year record. The saga first goes through a five-year descent, from 1998 to 2002: four consecutive drops, from 7.24 to 2.67 billion yen, or -63,1 %. It is the deepest of its history, and the one that costs it its front-rank standing.

Then come three revivals, all measurable : +68.5% in 2003 with the move to Advanced Generation, +47.6% in 2007 with The Rise of Darkrai — the high point of the modern era, at 5.02 billion yen, or 69% of the first film — and +65.1% in 2017 for the series' twentieth anniversary. Each one is followed by exactly three years of decline. Two caveats before reading a rule into it. The third revival has only three years behind it — 2018, 2019, 2020 — because the saga stops there: the pattern isn't verified there, only complete. And the rebound isn't driven by the TV series being renewed: two other renewals produced none, Black and White in 2011 (+4.1%, on a figure that combines both versions of the fourteenth film rather than the take of a single feature) and XY in 2014 (-8.2%).

The erosion the public has in mind comes later: five consecutive drops from 2012 to 2016, from 4.33 to 2.15 billion yen, or -50.3%. Shallower than the first, but a year longer. As for 2020 and its -32.2%, that is first of all a public-health accident, and nothing lets you check that it was only that: no new feature has been released since, and the next point of comparison will be 2027.

Six Pokémon features in Japan's all-time top 100

The ranking of the hundred highest-grossing Japanese films, as of August 30, 2026, holds six Pokémon entries : the first film at 50^th place, the second at 57^th, The Rise of Darkrai at 88^th, Spell of the Unown at 91^st, Giratina and the Sky Warrior at 92^nd to Arceus and the Jewel of Life at 98^th, three of those ranks being tied. No film later than 2009 appears there, and the scale has changed: the top of the ranking goes to Demon Slayer - Mugen Train, 40.75 billion yen, 5.6 times the best Pokémon score.

ORICON credited the series with 60.74 million Japanese moviegoers as early as the fourteenth film, released in 2011, in a report published in July 2012, and the 70 million mark was passed with the eighteenth, in 2015; no cumulative total for twenty-three films has been published.

Outside Japan: five films, then nothing

Only the first five features had a theatrical run outside Asia. Pokémon: The First Movie, released in North America on November 10, 1999, takes in $85,744,662 there for a worldwide total of 163.6 million, and from 1999 to 2025 it held the record for American box office for a Japanese film. Its budget is not established, with published figures ranging from 5 to 30 million dollars, none of them citing a production document, and the budgets of the following films are no better established : the saga has no profitability ranking.

The Western slide, on a like-for-like basis, reads in five numbers: 163.6, then 133.9, then 68.4, then 28.0, then 20.9 million dollars, Pokémon Heroes accounting for no more than 13% of the first. Wikipedia infoboxes publish higher figures for three of them, inherited from conversions at a hundred yen to the dollar. What follows isn't a decline but a stop: Jirachi Wish Maker goes straight to video in North America on June 1^er , 2004, less than a year after the summer when its Japanese gross had climbed back 68.5%. It is a distribution decision, not a verdict from the public.

France: 3.1 million admissions in fourteen months

Only three films had a standard run in French theaters, and their fall there is steeper than in Japan: 2,224,432 moviegoers for the first film, 730,002 for the second, 160,401 for the third, or 3,114,835 admissions in fourteen months, 71.4% of them for the first film alone. Across those same three titles, the Japanese gross falls 33% while French admissions fall 93 %.

These figures are worth more than dollar totals: they are admissions, comparable with no conversion. As of September 3, 2026, the first film still holds the admissions record for a Japanese film in France as well as in Germany, where it sold 3,222,452 tickets. Two caveats. The public record is incomplete: AlloCiné archives only the first two weeks of the third film, 80,410 admissions, half the total. And the two event re-releases, I Choose You! in November 2017 and Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel in November 2025, led to no published admissions figures.

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Who makes a Pokémon feature film

Three separate entities make a Pokémon feature. The OLM studio animates it, a production committee called Pikachu Project finances and owns it, and Toho distributes it in Japanese theaters — all twenty-three films, without exception. That split held for twenty-two years, with one shift: in 2017, with I Choose You!, Toho joins the production committee without giving up distribution, and therefore becomes a co-producer of the last four movies. The committee had ten companies in 1998, Nintendo and Game Freak included; it has had eight ever since.

The OLM studio and its team system

OLM is a company based in Setagaya, Tokyo, whose activity began on October 3, 1990 and which was incorporated in June 1994 : both dates circulate, and both are correct. This is not a Pokémon-only studio — it is also behind everything from Yo-kai Watch to Berserk — and it employed 204 people in March 2025. It works in teams named after their animation producer, listed in the credits as "TEAM ○○".

The definition found everywhere credits the movies to the team of Tsukasa Koitabashi ; the Japanese credits qualify that: the 1998 movie carries the TEAM OTA credit in its original version, Team Koitabashi is credited on the sixth through the sixteenth movie, Team Kamei on the three movies of the XY era, and Team Kato on movies 20, 21 and 23. The twenty-second has no 2D team at all.

Kunihiko Yuyama, twenty-one movies out of twenty-three

Born on October 15, 1952 in Nerima, Kunihiko Yuyama was one of the people who helped create OLM. He directed the first twenty features alone, then co-directed the twenty-second with Motonori Sakakibara: twenty-one movies out of twenty-three. The two exceptions share the same name, Tetsuo Yajima, who came over from the series XY, and directed movie 21 and then the last movie of the OLM era. Yet Yuyama left neither one: on both movies he remains credited as animation supervisor, and therefore appears in the credits of all twenty-three movies.

The writers, and the post-Shudo era

The screenplay is the role that changed hands the most across the saga. Takeshi Shudo, head writer of the first television seasons, wrote movies 1 and 2 and co-wrote the third; he died on October 29, 2010 in Nara, of a brain hemorrhage. His script came back to theaters nine years later: the 2019 remake follows the original so closely that the studio had to negotiate the rights with his estate, and Shudo is credited posthumously as its screenwriter — the only such case in the saga.

The music, by contrast, rests on a single man. Shinji Miyazaki, born on October 7, 1956, has been composing for the television series since 1997 and wrote the score for every feature but two: the White - Victini and Zekrom half of movie 14, handed to Akifumi Tada and Kazuhiko Sawaguchi, and movie 23, whose lead composer is Taiiku Okazaki. Two co-credits tend to be forgotten: Hirokazu Tanaka, Game Freak's longtime composer, co-wrote movies 1 and 2, and the accordionist coba co-wrote movie 5.

Location scouting abroad, before drawing the city

Production includes one constant that is rare for an annual series aimed at children: the team travels to a real country before drawing an imaginary city. The practice began with movie 5 and Venice, then went through Vancouver, Bavaria, Greece, the Netherlands and Dubai — and through France in 2011, for the Black and White double feature: Nice, Gourdon, Tourrettes-sur-Loup and Mont-Saint-Michel. For movie 17, Yuyama took his writer Hideki Sonoda and his composer Shinji Miyazaki to Canada.

What this production costs, on the other hand, remains unknown. Budgets are almost never made public. Three movies have one, and none of them is stable: the 1998 movie is put at 350 million yen on the Japanese side, then at 5 million dollars by the English Wikipedia, at 10 million by JP Box-Office and at 30 million by both Box Office Mojo and The Numbers; the 1999 movie is put at 30 million dollars; the 2000 movie at 3 million on The Numbers and at "3 to 16 million" on Wikipedia. For movies 4 through 23, the budget is not known.

Movie 22, remade entirely in computer graphics

Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution, released on July 12, 2019, is the only feature in the saga made entirely in 3DCG. Its credits line up three companies, from OLM and its digital arm OLM Digital to Sprite Animation Studios, the group's American computer graphics studio, based in Los Angeles. Miyazaki stayed on the music there despite the change of technique.

That machinery stopped dead after 2020: no Pokémon feature has been animated by OLM since, and the next one changes studio, hero and production committee (see below).

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The French titles, and why they do not look alike

Each feature in the saga carries three independent titles. The Japanese one follows a fixed formula, Gekijōban Pocket Monsters ("Pocket Monsters, the movie version"), the current cycle, then a subtitle that names the star creature. The American one is rewritten by the Western adapter, 4Kids Entertainment through the eighth movie, then Pokémon USA. The French one is decided by whichever distributor releases the movie in France, and there have been five of them: Warner Bros., Buena Vista, TF1 Vidéo, France Télévisions, Netflix. That third title translates neither the first nor the second: it translates a marketing strategy.

Why the first movie is not called Mewtwo Strikes Back

The Japanese title from 1998, Myūtsū no Gyakushū, means "Mewtwo's counterattack". The American title keeps it, but in second place: the poster sells Pokémon: The First Movie, and Mewtwo Strikes Back is only the subtitle. France translated the brand label, and nothing else. Its cover reads POKÉMON, then LE FILM, and pushes the duel down to a tagline printed lower: "#150 le plus grand match de tous les temps #151 — MEWTWO CONTRE MEW". Not "contre-attaque", the French for "strikes back". So the subtitle was not lost along the way: it was never the title.

Continental Europe split in two on this point. Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese and Spanish kept the duel in the title — Pokémon de Film: Mewtwo tegen Mew, Pokémon: La película - Mewtwo vs. Mew. Only German, Italian and French cut it down to the brand label, pushing Mewtwo versus Mew back to the tagline or the title card.

"Mewtwo contre-attaque", the French for Mewtwo Strikes Back, became an official French title twenty years later, with the remake made available in French on February 27, 2020 on Netflix under the name Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution. Its French title card does not even show the word "Pokémon", only MEWTWO CONTRE-ATTAQUE and, on a banner, ÉVOLUTION. Our feature on this remake details what it changes in the 1998 story.

The subtitle then reattached itself to the original movie, through home video and streaming rather than through theaters: Wikipedia, TMDB and JustWatch now call the 1998 movie Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back. No editorial source dates this shift ; two French traces bracket it, both later than the HD remaster: the August 30, 2016 rerun on NT1 and the France Télévisions DVD of October 5, 2016.

Hence a convention for everything that follows: on this page, the first movie is written Pokémon: The First Movie, the Poképédia spelling. The other spellings noted here refer to the same work.

A titling convention that changes with every cycle

Numbering lasted only three movies: Pokémon: The Movie 2000 - The Power of One, Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown to Pokémon 4Ever - Celebi, Voice of the Forest, whose number is an English pun imported as is, 4Ever and weighs forever. No feature was numbered in French after that one. Then come five titles in "Pokémon :" form between the seventh and the twelfth movie, the ninth aside, followed by a one-off case: Pokémon - Zoroark: Master of Illusions, the only title in the saga to combine a dash and a colon.

The next shift can be dated. "Pokémon, le film :" appears with the fourteenth movie, which reached France on April 18, 2012 on Disney XD, and it is the literal translation of Pokémon the Movie: adopted at the same moment in the United States. The formula holds to the very end of the saga, with a single exception after 2012: the 2019 remake, which copies its American title.

The punctuation, for its part, was never settled: Poképédia writes Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown while Wikipedia writes The Spell of the Unown. One movie even carries two French titles : the fifteenth exists as Kyurem VS the Sword of Justice and as Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice, with Bulbapedia listing both without dating them and Poképédia keeping only the second — and that second one is what fixed the French name of the legendary group, which the games had never named, since Poképédia sources its "Lames de la Justice" (Swords of Justice) article on the movie itself.

The two titles that do not begin with "Pokémon"

You read everywhere, including in our own features, that Pokémon Heroes is the only feature whose French title does not begin with "Pokémon". There are two of them. Poképédia's Modèle:Film, the table that names every movie throughout the encyclopedia, gives for the sixth Jirachi Wish Maker, without the brand word: out of twenty-three entries, two do not open on "Pokémon", not just one.

The commercial objects tell a different story, and not in the same direction for the two movies. The TF1 Vidéo DVD cover of the sixth movie stacks POKÉMON, JIRACHI, then "Le génie des vœux". The fifth movie's cover does the opposite : LES HÉROS on the first line, POKÉMON on the second, like the encyclopedia title. Neither source is wrong: one records the title of the work, the other a cover layout constraint. They only line up for the Alto Mare movie.

Two neighboring cases round out the picture. The ninth movie does begin with "Pokémon", but the word belongs to the name of the game Pokémon Ranger, not to a brand prefix. And on the title cards recorded by Bulbapedia, four other movies lose the prefix their covers carry : the eighth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth.

What the French title drops along the way

Side by side, the three titles of one movie state three promises: the Japanese one names the creature, the American one rephrases for its market, the French one inherits from the American and cuts further still. Ten movies are enough to see the mechanism at work.

Two discrepancies keep coming back. The headline creature vanishes from the French title : Entei in the third movie, which the American title had nonetheless kept; Shaymin in the eleventh and Magearna in the nineteenth, which the American titles had already dropped before we did. And the meaning drifts from one language to the next: the English title of the eighteenth movie announces a clash of ages, the French one a clash of legends. Only two movies line up all three languages without a gap: the twentieth, I Choose You!, and the 2019 remake.

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Dubbing and editing: what the West changed in the movies

A Pokémon movie does not reach France straight from Japanese: it goes through an international cut rebuilt in English. Up to the eighth feature, that cut was made by 4Kids Entertainment ; from the ninth on, by Pokémon USA, which handed it to TAJ Productions and then to DuArt Film & Video. That detour explains almost everything that follows: cuts, rewritten dialogue and replaced scores are American decisions, made before any French actor ever set foot in a booth.

The heaviest cut of all is the prologue of the first movie. Mewtwo is a talking child there, one who meets Ambertwo — the clone ofAmber, Dr. Fuji's dead daughter — who watches the other clones die around him, and who is put to sleep so his trauma can be erased. Only two minutes of it were ever dubbed, placed before the movie on the French VHS, then as a bonus on the DVD. The prologue as a whole was never dubbed: in France it exists only in subtitled English, as an extra on the DVD of Mewtwo Returns.

The dialogue, for its part, changed subject. Bulbapedia sums up the gap in the first movie in a single sentence: the Japanese version explores existential themes, while the English dub puts an anti-violence message in their place.

• Mewtwo asks Dr. Fuji whether he was created by God: the question disappears in English, and the 2019 remake sidesteps it by having him invoke nature instead.
• The closing speech is turned inside out: in Japanese, Mew argues that copies will never beat the originals; in English, true strength comes from the heart, and Meowth adds a moral about what brings everyone together.
• The second movie is given the Chosen One concept, absent from the original, and an untranslatable pun: the English prophecy fears that the earth will be reduced to ashes, ash, the English first name of the hero the French call Sacha.
• The third invents the disappearance of Molly Hale's mother and moves the father's return up ahead of the end credits, 4Kids having decided that Western audiences leave the theater too early.
• The fifth loses two minutes of preamble on the origin of Alto Mare, ties Annie and Oakley to Team Rocket and runs the whole picture through a blue filter.

The music followed the same path, then turned back. 4Kids rescored the first three movies, Team Rocket's themes excepted: in the clone battle, the Japanese battle music gives way to the song Brother My Brother. From the fourth movie on, the Japanese soundtrack is kept for the most part, and the sixth is the first whose title-screen music itself is left intact. The parenthesis reopens only once, thirteen years later, with the seventeenth movie, rescored again for export.

The mistakes, for their part, were never corrected, and they do not all come from the same place. Three go back to the American adaptation, and the first movie carries all of them: the Pidgeot is called Pidgeotto there, and Team Rocket refers to a Scyther as "Alakazam" and to a Sandslash as "Sandshrew". The others are French. The fourth movie carries two of them: Sammy calls for a "Coup de Tête" when the move is actually named Coup d'Boule (Headbutt), and Togepi pronounces its own name "Tojepi".

Then come the seventh, which calls its city Larousse City instead of Dicoville, and the eighth, where Kidd Summers says that Sir Aaron sealed Lucario in the béton (concrete) instead of the bâton (staff), and the twentieth, where a group of Diglett shout "Trio trio trio", which is Dugtrio's cry. The last one belongs to the same family: a Gloom, No. 0044, cries "Rafflesia" — the French name of No. 0045, its own evolution.

On the French side, the dubbing changed setup five times in twenty-one years.

The studio behind the third movie is documented nowhere, and neither are those of movies 20, 21 and 23. In 2007, when three features left the series' Belgian team for a Paris studio, Nessym Guetat, the voice of Meowth, was the only actor the two casts had in common, entire castings compared. Then, from the thirteenth to the twenty-second movie, the most stable team of the whole saga settles in. No redub is on record: every reissue that has been checked reuses the original track, and the 2012 one still lets Espeon and Jessie's Wobbuffet announce their English names in the fifth.

For seven movies, two French-language versions coexisted. Quebec had its own titles and its own dub up to Destiny Deoxys, the last movie in the franchise dubbed in Quebec French ; after it, databases simply copy the European title for want of a distinct version. The two traditions did not handle names the same way: Quebec kept Ash Ketchum, Misty and Meowth where France says Sacha, Ondine and Miaouss. And they crossed paths once — the European French dub of the seventh movie reuses the Quebec adaptation.

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One legendary per poster: the rule and its exceptions

It is the most quoted rule in the saga: every movie is supposed to have its legendary. Poképédia states it cautiously — "almost all" of the features put a Legendary or Mythical Pokémon on screen — without saying what that "almost" covers. Checked movie by movie, the broad version of the rule turns out to allow no exception at all: all 23 movies field at least one Legendary or one Mythical. That "almost" only becomes necessary if you tighten the statement, which can be done in three ways, for three different counts.

The two labels are not synonyms: the 94 creatures that carry them break down into 71 Legendaries and 23 Mythicals. Ask for a Legendary in the strict sense, and the count drops to 22 movies out of 23. The only one missing is the twenty-third: Zarude and the Shiny Celebi alongside it are both Mythicals, and no Legendary ever appears on screen.

Ask instead for a Mythical, and the rule falls to 20 movies out of 23 : the second, third and fifth include none at all, and since the sixth the chain has never broken again, which makes eighteen movies in a row. One caveat on the third: its Entei is an illusion manufactured by the Unown, which makes it, for Bulbapedia, the first movie with no true Legendary — on that reading, the strict count goes from 22 down to 21.

Third tightening, the most visible on screen: the creature carrying the movie is not always a rare one. Three movies out of 23 hand their lead role to an ordinary species — the Unown in the third, Lucario in the eighth, Zoroark in the thirteenth. None of the three is Legendary or Mythical, and all three movies feature some anyway.

Why the star almost always comes from the games of the moment

The rule has a mechanical cause: the movie comes out every summer in the middle of the current generation's cycle and serves as a showcase for the games of the moment. Counted across the whole cast rather than the poster alone, the rule "at least one Legendary or Mythical from the current generation" holds in 20 movies out of 23. The fifth escapes it, Latias and Latios being third-generation four months before Ruby and Sapphire ; so does the thirteenth, where Celebi and the Johto beasts are second-generation; and the twenty-second above all, since the 2019 remake replays the first movie with Mewtwo and Mew at a time when Sun and Moon were the games on consoles.

The first two exceptions are not accidents, but the effect of a second tradition: the last movie of a cycle shows a creature from the following generation. Opened by the fifth movie in 2002, it holds until the nineteenth in 2016, and it explains Manaphy in 2006, Zorua and Zoroark in 2010, Magearna in 2016. Six movies in all — the second, fifth, eighth, ninth, thirteenth and nineteenth — show their star before it exists in a released game, two months early for Manaphy and fourteen for Lucario.

The check therefore has to cover the entire cast, never the poster alone. The eighth movie makes the demonstration : neither Lucario nor Mew belongs to the generation then current, but the three Hoenn golems — Regirock, Regice and Registeel — guard the vaults beneath the castle. The thirteenth, for its part, has no possible fallback: not a single fourth-generation Legendary appears on its screen.

The table lists the 23 movies, the rare creature they put forward and its generation; the generation of the games current at the time is given only when it differs.

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The movie opens, the Pokémon is distributed in the games

The least-discussed mechanism of the saga is also the most consistent: every feature film hands players a Pokémon. Poképédia puts it plainly: Pokémon are "first distributed in Japan in movie theaters or during advance booking periods," then picked up elsewhere case by case. Two Japanese channels come back again and again, recognizable by the original Trainer stamped on the Pokémon: "Eigakan," meaning "movie theater", for the gift handed out during the screening, and the advance-ticket distribution, which rewards buying a ticket before release. Out of twenty-three movies, eighteen led to at least one distribution — numbers 5, 6 and 8 through 23 — and only thirteen to an event reachable from France.

The gift is almost never decorative: it works as a software key to content that is otherwise out of reach. The Shiny Raikou, Entei and Suicune trio from the thirteenth movie, transferred into Black and White, unlocks Lostlorn Forest and its level 25 Zoroark; the Regigigas from the eleventh unlocks the three titans in Pokémon Platinum. Arceus goes the furthest: handed out in theaters from July 18 to September 30, 2009, it triggers in HeartGold and SoulSilver the Sinjoh Ruins event, which grants a level 1 dragon.

The channel itself changed six times in twenty years, following the hardware — and the vocabulary of the time isn't what you'd expect: never a "gift card," but local wireless, Mystery Gift, serial codes, QR Codes.

• Bonus disc and cable (2003-2004) : the European Jirachi is obtained in Pokémon Channel (April 1, 2004) and transfers to Ruby and Sapphire over a GCN-GBA cable.
• Local wireless (2005-2013) : a kiosk or a distribution cartridge, in theaters or in stores; the dominant model for eight years.
• Mystery Gift over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (2008-2013) : the Pokémon arrives at home.
• Serial code (2014-2021) : a scratch card, then a code printed on the store receipt starting in November 2015, "avoiding stock problems," then a code sent by email.
• QR Code (2016-2017) : scanned inside the game, provided you're already far enough along in it.
• Infrared (2015) : a one-off, the six Legendary Pokémon from the eighteenth movie, chosen at a kiosk in the store where the ticket had been bought.

France joined the circuit late. The first movie gift handed out on French soil is the Darkrai "ALAMOS," distributed at GAME from July 3 to 6, 2008, five weeks before the movie's first French airing: Poképédia's European table leaves it out, while Bulbapedia and Serebii's Eventdex both record it. The first nationwide event follows only ten months later, with the "Film11" Shaymin, from May 15 to June 15, 2009, in twelve retail chains, from BHV to Virgin. The network then shrinks: FNAC, GAME and Micromania from 2011 to 2013, Micromania alone from 2015, no stores at all after 2020. In the meantime, Paris Games Week served as a pickup point five years running, from Diancie in 2014 to Zeraora in 2018.

Five movies distributed nothing at all on release, the first five, for which neither Poképédia nor Bulbapedia lists a single event tied to a feature film: the only Pokémon attached to the fifth movie, the 2022 Latias, dates from its Japanese 25th-anniversary rerelease, twenty years later. Two others never left Asia: the sixteenth, whose 2013 Mewtwo and Shiny Genesect stayed Japanese, and the twenty-second, limited to a Japanese pre-order and then to the screening of the Korean dub. The seventh remains disputed: nothing in Japan according to the reference list, but a Deoxys "DOEL" distributed in the Netherlands on May 25 and 26, 2006.

A classic trap, incidentally: the Mewtwo distributed in France starting August 9, 2019, at PicWicToys, was not celebrating Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution but the Sun & Moon - Unbroken Bonds expansion of the trading card game.

Several Pokémon were distributed before they existed in any game. The QR Code for Magearna, printed on a Ga-Olé arcade disc and handed to Japanese moviegoers in July 2016, worked in no existing game. The Partner Cap Pikachu followed the same path on November 5 and 6, 2017, eleven days before Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. France saw the opposite anomaly: the Zarude from the twenty-third movie arrived there from November 13 to December 13, 2020, six weeks before the movie's Japanese release and nearly eleven months before Netflix.

The mechanism didn't die with the last feature film: at the Film Fest for the 25th anniversary, in Japan, codes were still handed to audiences at three rereleases, from August 11 to September 8, 2022, all of them expiring on September 30 — and none of those three events left Japan. For Pokémon: Wild Card, announced on August 30, 2026, nothing had been announced as of September 3, 2026.

Twelve rows are enough to show the mechanism and its six successive channels. They do not list the eighteen movies that ran a distribution : the table keeps one event per channel and per territory, not every one of them.

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The grammar of a Pokémon feature film

Twenty-three feature films in twenty-two years create habits. Every pattern described here therefore carries its count and its named exceptions : a statement that is accurate about one movie quickly becomes a false rule about the other twenty-two.

July, Saturday, then Friday

The best-kept pattern is a calendar one: 22 of the 23 movies opened in Japan in July, and there is a single exception — Secrets of the Jungle, which the pandemic pushed back to December 25, 2020.

The window is narrower still: the 22 Japanese July dates fit within thirteen days, from the 7th to the 19th : the floor is July 7, 2001 (fourth movie), the ceiling July 19 (sixth, eleventh, seventeenth). The day of the week changed only once: movies 1 through 20 opened on a Saturday, twenty times in a row, movies 21, 22 and 23 on a Friday. On the French side, no date rule exists.

Three 23-out-of-23 constants, and what they hide

Pikachu has never missed a movie: 23 appearances out of 23, and his presence is part of the very definition Poképédia gives of the format. He triggers the resolution of the climax in at least two movies: in the first with his tears, in the twentieth by sweeping Marshadow away with a Thunderbolt, alone on screen. That twentieth movie is also the first where he really speaks, other than through subtitles.

Jessie, James and Meowth form the other complete run: the trio appears in the cast of all 23 movies. But Team Rocket supplies the main antagonist of only three movies — Giovanni in the first and in its remake, the Iron-Masked Marauder in the fourth. Elsewhere, the trio are stowaways, accidental rescuers, the villain's helpers or silent extras: the fifteenth is the only movie where they have no lines at all.

In at least seven movies, the trio never crosses paths with Ash or his companions — movies 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16. That figure is a floor: the sources stop making this observation after the seventeenth movie, and the twenty-first is a likely eighth case that none of them writes down. The trio also closes the movie, last on screen before the credits, in movies 1 through 4 and then, once more, in the thirteenth.

The companions rotate with the TV seasons. Ash travels without a single companion from the series in 3 of the 23 movies : the twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-third.

One nuance: the twentieth brings back eleven companions in cameos during its end credits. Bulbapedia writes of the twenty-first that it is the first movie in which no friend of Ash from the series appears in any form whatsoever; "first" is not "only," and nothing equivalent has been noted for the twenty-third, where Ash travels with no one either. Brock, present in movies 1 through 13, does not get a main role again until the twenty-second, nine years later ; for Misty, absent since the fifth, the gap is seventeen years.

The narrative skeleton, the sacrifice and the scene of tears

The plot repeats itself enough to be described, as long as you accept that this model is a reading and not a documented breakdown: a mythological or scientific prologue, the group's arrival in a setting drawn for the movie, an encounter with a Pokémon first taken for a threat, the revelation that the danger comes from a human, escalation, sacrifice, separation. The escalation usually stays confined to the movie's own setting, but not always : the second plays for the world's climate balance, and the twelfth has Arceus judge all of humanity. The clearest structural departures: the third, which replaces the collective stake with a little girl's grief and does without an antagonist; the eleventh, the first Pokémon movie to be a sequel to another; the twenty-third, where Ash is no more than a supporting character.

That leaves the motif everyone remembers, established as early as the first movie by a harbor legend: a Pokémon's tears are said to have once brought drowned people back to life. The death, sacrifice or petrification of a central character occurs in 10 of the 23 movies — movies 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 17, 19, 20 and 23. Only two leave a death that is never reversed: the fifth, where Latios sacrifices himself, and the eighth, where Lucario and Sir Aaron both die. Everywhere else, the sacrifice is undone before the credits: at 10 out of 23, the motif remains a minority next to the real constants, which are Pikachu, the trio and the end credits.

Theme songs and running times

All 23 movies have a Japanese ending theme; seven have no opening theme at all — movies 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18 and 21. "Mezase Pokémon Master," the historic opening of the TV series, opens five movies in five different versions: movies 1, 4, 5, 20 and 22. The twenty-third is the only one that uses no theme taken from the series. None of this applies to the French versions, which no source documents.

As for running times, the 23 movies average 88 minutes, from the shortest — the fifteenth, 72 minutes according to Poképédia and Bulbapedia, 71 according to the English Wikipedia — to the longest, the ninth, which Bulbapedia lists at 105 minutes and the English Wikipedia at 107. These figures describe the international versions; the TV edits are shorter. The trend breaks down into four blocks: an average of 76.5 minutes for movies 1 to 6, 97.3 for movies 7 to 14, 74.5 for movies 15 to 18, 98.0 for movies 19 to 23. The two short stretches are the ones where a short film played before the feature in theaters.

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Two continuities, one Ash

Poképédia ties every feature film to a season of Pokémon the Series, "since, in most cases, the events of a movie take place during the season airing at the time in Japan." Bulbapedia puts a limit on the rule: every movie up to Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel, that is movies 1 through 19, is canon for the TV series. The twentieth changes the rules, and the saga splits in two.

The flip side is that nothing sticks. Bulbapedia sees in them, "most of the time," the equivalent of filler episodes: Ash catches, evolves and releases no Pokémon in them, and wins neither a badge nor a ribbon. Poképédia reaches the same conclusion. The reason is industrial: a movie is timed to the release schedule of the current generation's games and to the event distributions that come with it, not to the hero's progress.

Two exceptions chip away at the rule, in opposite directions. The eighth movie "introduces the concept of aura into the canon of the animated series", an ability the series goes on to credit him with at least four more times, from episode DP056 to JN021; the fourth caused the GS Ball storyline, which was meant to hold a Celebi, to be dropped. Season 19 conversely gets an explicit tie-in: the opening of Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel shows Alain's Gym battle against Korrina.

The only genuinely disputed case is the fourteenth movie, released in two versions on the same day. Poképédia declares both of them non-canon, "because in BW110, Iris says she would like to meet Zekrom, whereas in the movie she is supposed to have seen it." Bulbapedia says the opposite, "only one of the two versions of the fourteenth movie is canon," without saying which one. The disagreement is real; at least one of the two versions is incompatible with season 14.

No statement from The Pokémon Company on the canonicity of movies 1 through 19 was found as of September 3, 2026 : that status is a convention documented by the wikis, not a publisher's position. The only official word found concerns the other continuity: a panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2023 describes it as the movie universe opened by I Choose You!.

The break has a date. I Choose You! goes back in 2017 to Ash's very first day, and Poképédia announces it at the top of its cycle 6: "From this cycle on, the Pokémon movies move completely away from Pokémon the Series. Movies 20 and 21 establish an alternate continuity." Its page for the twenty-third movie attaches it there as well. The exact scope is therefore movies 20, 21 and 23, plus the special episode Un ciel bleu lointain !, which aired in Japan on December 23, 2022, and which is not a movie. Bulbapedia even treats Ash there as a separate character, with a page of his own.

The change is visible on screen, and the twentieth movie carries the whole list : captures, evolutions, a Charmander that obeys. The twenty-third came out during season 23, where Ash travels with Goh, and never shows Goh anywhere. That does not make it a brand-new world: the special episode calls back to the Mankey from episode 25.

That leaves the twenty-second, outside both continuities. Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution is "a 3D remake of the first feature film," filed on its own by Poképédia under the "Other" group of its banner, separate from the "Alternate continuity" group reserved for movies 20, 21 and 23. It replays season 1, Misty and Brock included. Finally, no movie has been written into the continuity of an ongoing series since 2016 : Pokémon Horizons: The Series has none as of September 3, 2026. A single Ash Ketchum on screen, two in the wiki entries.

The table below therefore fits two different regimes into a single column. For movies 1 through 19, "Linked season" gives the season the movie takes place in ; for movies 20 through 23, only the one that was airing in Japan at the time of release, with no narrative link.

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What order to watch the twenty-three feature films in

The rule only holds up if its exceptions are stated in the same sentence: twenty of the twenty-three feature films stand alone and can be watched in any order, and the other three — the tenth, eleventh and twelfth — form a trilogy whose order is fixed. Writing "the Pokémon movies are standalone" without naming the Sinnoh trilogy means sending a viewer into Giratina and the Sky Warrior without having seen the movie whose damage it repairs.

That independence is a by-product of how they were made, not an authorial intent: every feature borrows the traveling group of the moment and hands it back untouched at the end. A Pokémon movie almost never moves the hero forward, and the only two marks a movie has left on the series run the other way: it is the series that reaches for the movie, and no viewing order follows from that.

The only exceptions, and how binding they are

What remains is to separate what is required from what is merely recommended. Only one constraint exists inside the twenty-three movies : The Rise of Darkrai, then Giratina and the Sky Warrior, then Arceus and the Jewel of Life, welded together by a flashback. Two others involve works that are not feature films: Mewtwo Returns is the direct sequel to the first movie, Mewtwo - Prologue to Awakening the explicit prologue to the sixteenth.

The rest is a matter of comfort. The twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-third movies make up the alternate continuity, and none of the three depends narratively on the other two. Starting with I Choose You! is still the better choice: it is the only one that explains why Ash travels without companions and why nothing from the series applies. The special episode Un ciel bleu lointain ! comes next, after Secrets of the Jungle. Recommended is not required: the distinction matters.

Three possible orders, only one worth recommending

The order to follow is the Japanese release order, from July 18, 1998 to December 25, 2020, and the reason checks out: for the first nineteen feature films, it is already the internal chronological order. Mapped onto Poképédia's episode numbering, their documented placements form a strictly increasing sequence, from episode 65 to the episodes of the XY era. No movie needs to be swapped with another.

Internal shifts do exist, though. The first movie shows an eleven-episode gap between its release slot and its place in the story, a consequence of the December 1997 interruption. The eighth sits right on the hinge between two seasons; the thirteenth, fourteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth come before the episodes they were released between. These adjustments move a movie by a few episodes, never by a rank.

Only one card really changes place. Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution is the twenty-second movie in release order and replays the events of the first: in internal chronology, it sits right next to the 1998 movie. Watching it right after the original, for the comparison, is the only swap that actually adds anything.

The French order works as a piece of history, not as a guide. It departs from the Japanese order on two swaps, and above all it does not define a complete order : the fourth, sixth and seventh movies arrived together, on the same day and in the same box set.

One last landmark, to close: the only prerequisite for a movie from the classic era comes down to the name of a traveling group, the one made up of the companions that the grammar of the saga lines up movie by movie. That landmark places a cycle, not a movie. Knowing which one to start with is another question.

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Lukewarm critics, loyal audience: how the movies were received

The saga's reception lives in a gap, not in a score. On Rotten Tomatoes, Pokémon: The First Movie posts 17% favorable press reviews out of 90 critics, and 78% favorable audience reviews out of more than 50,000 ratings, recorded on September 3, 2026. The first three feature films also carry a grade of A- from the CinemaScore panel, on a scale running from A+ to F.

The same split repeats across the nine movies that have a scored page. On the press side, scores run from 16% for Pokémon 4Ever, out of 37 reviews, to 71% for The Power of Us, but out of only seven reviews; on the audience side, none drops below 46%. Metacritic puts it most bluntly: across its four surviving Metascores, ranging from 22 to 28 out of 100, the press is labeled "Generally Unfavorable" and the public "Generally Favorable" for the same title, with user scores ranging from 7.4 to 7.5 out of 10.

The rest of the saga was never rated at all. Fourteen films, all released between 2003 and 2016, never received a single aggregate score, no Tomatometer, no Metascore, and Secrets of the Jungle collected only two press reviews, below the publication threshold. The cause is mechanical: no Pokémon film received a wide theatrical release in the United States between 2003 and 2017.

France, 2000-2001: a lukewarm press, an audience drifting away

The films reached France at the height of Pokémania, which Wikipedia dates "from October 8, 1999" and "mainly over two years": the only three French theatrical releases fall inside that window. The French press was not hostile, it was lukewarm. AlloCiné gives 2.4 out of 5 to the first film (7 reviews), 2.8 to the second (6 reviews), 2.6 to the third (5 reviews).

The Power of One therefore earns the best press score of the three, in December 2000, at the very moment when First faults it for leaving "an unfortunate impression of the end of a reign." Six months later, Le Figaro Magazine hands the third film the harshest French verdict of the entire saga, writing that he would rather take a child "to the Musée Grévin so as not to show him that."

Audiences, for their part, drift away without the scores moving. The three press scores fit within four tenths of a point, and the viewer scores on AlloCiné are nearly identical — 2.7 out of 5 for the first film (1,314 ratings), 2.8 for the second (529 ratings), 2.8 for the third (354 ratings) — while admissions are divided by fourteen.

The French ranking of the twenty-three films today

SensCritique is the only French source that rates the entire saga. Below are its community's scores, out of 10, recorded on September 3, 2026; the sample sizes range from 220 to 13,957 ratings depending on the film. The fourteenth, released in two versions, has two entries there.

Three takeaways. No Pokémon film reaches 6.3 out of 10 in France, and none drops below 4.3 : a 1.9-point spread, that of an audience seeing neither masterpiece nor disaster. The first film dwarfs every other in visibility, its 13,957 ratings accounting for 42.4% of the 32,880 ratings left across all the entries. And the Black and White cycle is the least loved: three of its four entries occupy three of the last four places, the fourth going to Diancie.

The best and the worst reviewed today

Two titles gather the favorable verdicts. Spell of the Unown is the only one of the early films whose Rotten Tomatoes consensus credited the screenplay, and two in-depth English-language articles, at Flixist and at The Escapist, now name it the best of the saga. Pokémon Heroes has won three audience votes in five years: first among all films in the July 2017 fan poll, first in its category in the official February 2021 poll, and one of the three films brought back to Japanese theaters in 2022, chosen by 200,000 votes. That 2021 poll also crowns Genesect and the Legend Awakened to Hoopa and the Clash of Ages, the two films most savaged by the English-language press.

At the other end, two films unite everyone against them. Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice closes out the French ranking with 4.3 out of 10, and Anime News Network had already given it a C- on May 17, 2013. Pokémon 4Ever holds both the lowest Tomatometer of the twenty-three films and 5.1 out of 10 on the French side. Finally, the 2019 CGI remake is the only film in the saga whose audience average falls below the critics' — by just two points, once the two scales are brought onto a common basis: 6.00 out of 10 on the critics' side, the highest of the nine entries, against 2.9 out of 5 on the audience side, the lowest, that is 60% against 58%. On the same site's other indicator, the share of favorable reviews, the ranking flips: 44% for the press, 46% for the audience.

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What is not a Pokémon film

Eighteen works and families of works orbit the twenty-three feature films, and the public takes them for movies. The misunderstanding has a documented cause: Bulbapedia states, at the head of its list of feature-length specials, that these works were never shown in Japanese theaters and that several were nonetheless sold as films when they were dubbed for the West. The clearest French case is the first: Warner pushed Pokémon: Mewtwo Returns in 2002 as a fourth adventure, and retail listings long catalogued it as "Pokémon 4" — five years before the real fourth film reached France, on May 16, 2007.

The sorting rests on three cumulative conditions: being a feature film, being an animated film, and having played in Japanese theaters within the series that the official Japanese site calls "Pocket Monsters the Movie." No single one is enough on its own, and that is where most of the explanations in circulation go wrong. "It never played in theaters" does not hold for Pokémon Detective Pikachu, released in Japan on May 3, 2019 and distributed by Toho like the animated features: animation is the only thing it lacks, and its own section covers it in detail. Having played in theaters is not enough either: Stories from the Johto Region - The Final Chapter, four Johto episodes re-edited into a feature, opened in theaters on May 1, 2024, in South Korea and never in Japan.

"Ash isn't in it" runs into Mewtwo Returns, The Mastermind of Mirage Pokémon to The Arceus Chronicles, where he plays the lead. And "it's not produced by OLM" collapses right away: Pokémon Generations is produced by OLM and is not a film.

The feature-length formats that never saw a Japanese theater

Five works of film-comparable length were shown somewhere other than in theaters. Pokémon: Mewtwo Returns is a TV Tokyo year-end special, broadcast on December 30, 2000; it runs an hour — 60 minutes according to Wikipedia, 1 hour 1 minute on the French edition — and extends the 1998 feature. France received it on August 21, 2002, on VHS and DVD. The Legend of Thunder follows exactly one year later, to the day: a TV movie aired in one piece in Japan on December 30, 2001, it was only split into three parts for the dub, and it reached France as episodes PC12 through PC14 of Pokémon Chronicles.

Pokémon: The Mastermind of Mirage Pokémon was commissioned by The Pokémon Company International for the franchise's tenth anniversary on the American side: the United States saw it on April 29, 2006, Japan in streaming from October 13 to 31, 2006, France on DVD on November 20, 2007. No source consulted gives its running time. Pokémon Origins, a four-episode miniseries adapting Pokémon Red and Blue, aired in one go on October 2, 2013, ten days before the release of Pokémon X and Y, then served up in France episode by episode in November 2013 and rerun on Gulli on April 12, 2014. Pokemon: The Arceus Chronicles, finally, consists of four episodes aired in Japan on January 21 and 28, 2022 on Amazon Prime Video, alongside the twenty-fifth season, which the international release stitched back together into a 63-minute mini-movie, on Netflix France since September 23, 2022.

The series, the web animations and one compilation

Pokémon Chronicles never existed in Japan: it is a Western edit of 22 episodes drawn from three sources — sixteen episodes of the show Pokémon Hoso (2002-2004), the 2001 TV movie already mentioned and three specials taken from the Christmas OVAs of 1998 to 2000. Ash is not the hero here, without being absent from it either : Bulbapedia counts three brief appearances for him. Gulli aired it in February 2008; in France it can now be found only on DVD.

Six web animations follow, free and cut into episodes a few minutes long; the table below names them one by one. The first, Pokémon Generations, was served internationally from September 16 to December 23, 2016 and in Japan from December 9, 2016 to February 2, 2017; the most recent dates from 2023. All of them can be watched on the official YouTube channels: the listings that still point to the Pokémon TV app lead to a service that has shut down.

Added to these are Pokétoon, a web series with a different visual style in every episode, still being updated in August 2026 and available in the same place, and two full-length streaming-platform series: Pokémon Concierge, on Netflix France, and Pokémon Tales — The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d and Pichu, announced on Disney+ for 2027.

Two neighboring families stop at the same threshold. Special episodes attached to a film remain episodes of the series: Mewtwo - Prologue to Awakening, aired in Japan on July 11, 2013 and in France on May 1, 2014, is the best known of them. The ten opening short films, for their part, appear in the same official list as the features: only their length keeps them out.

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Detective Pikachu, the live-action movie

Pokémon Detective Pikachu reached Japanese theaters on May 3, 2019, French ones on May 8, and American ones on May 10. France therefore saw it two days before North America, in the first worldwide wave. From Japan to Egypt, the entire global gap fits into 68 days, when the animated movies used to be measured in years.

Directed by Rob Letterman, produced by Legendary Entertainment with The Pokémon Company and Toho, distributed by Warner Bros. outside Japan and China, it runs 104 minutes and cost $150 million, the biggest budget in the franchise. It is also the first Pokémon movie rated PG by the MPAA. Ryan Reynolds voices Pikachu and plays Harry Goodman; Pierre Tessier dubs him in French, but Ikue Ōtani, the voice of Pikachu since 1997, provides his cries in both versions. When Pikachu squeaks, that's her; it's only when he speaks that you hear an adult.

The series Detective Pikachu has three games; the movie adapts only the second. The first one, released on February 3, 2016 on the Japanese Nintendo 3DS eShop, was never translated or released in France ; its three chapters became the first three of the next one, released on March 23, 2018 in Japan as well as in Europe, off to the side of the main video game series. Yet the movie had been announced back in July 2016 : its announcement came twenty months before its source material went on sale in France. The third one, Detective Pikachu Returns (Switch, October 6, 2023), was presented by Tsunekazu Ishihara as the epilogue to this story, with an ending deliberately different from the movie's.

The movie meets none of the criteria that define the twenty-three feature films: not animated, not made by OLM, no Ash Ketchum, no season it ties into. That boundary is an editorial convention, not a rule laid down by The Pokémon Company, which has never laid down any; Bulbapedia, on the contrary, files it among the "Pokémon movies". Still, 2019 is the only year in which two Pokémon movies of different kinds came out in Japan : this one on May 3, and Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution on July 12, both with Mewtwo as the star.

It took in $433.3 million in its original run and $451.5 million including re-releases: the franchise's best worldwide box office, but not its most profitable, since its $150 million budget gives it the lowest revenue-to-cost ratio among the only four Pokémon movies whose budget has ever been published — the first three feature films and this one. Its top international market is not Japan but China, at $93.7 million. In France, it drew about 1.68 million admissions, give or take 69 tickets depending on the source, the franchise's second-best score in French theaters, 542,386 admissions behind Pokémon: The First Movie and more than ten times the score of the last animated movie given a nationwide release in French theaters.

Critics were lukewarm, audiences warmer: 68% positive out of 316 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, 53 out of 100 on Metacritic, against 3.1/5 from the press versus 3.5/5 from moviegoers on AlloCiné. TF1 aired it on December 29, 2021 for 2.33 million viewers. And as of September 3, 2026, it is not included in any subscription service in France : it can only be bought or rented, or caught on television — the opposite of the last two animated movies, which never reached French theaters and settled on Netflix.

The sequel and the series: what is confirmed, what is not

A sequel really was announced by Legendary in January 2019, with Oren Uziel writing. The last official word dates from early February 2023: a studio representative told Polygon that the movie was "in active development", with The Pokémon Company declining to comment. That statement is three years and seven months old, and nothing official has followed it.

The rest is press reporting or stolen documents: Deadline wrote on March 3, 2023 that Jonathan Krisel would direct and Chris Galletta would write, without any press release confirming it; and the files stolen from Game Freak in August 2024, leaked in October, give a working title, The Great Detective Pikachu, and Jordan Vogt-Roberts in place of Krisel — none of this has been authenticated by the rights holders. The Pokémon Presents of February 27, 2026 announced nothing in live action: the movie is neither released, nor dated, nor officially canceled.

The Netflix series, for its part, has never been confirmed by anyone. It rests on a Variety exclusive from July 26, 2021, which called it "in early development", with Joe Henderson (Lucifer) writing: neither Netflix nor The Pokémon Company has ever spoken about it publicly. The same October 2024 leak credits it with a code name, "Project Discovery", eight episodes, and a plot centered on Red rather than on Ash Ketchum. Five years after the scoop: no order, no casting, no date, no official title.

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Six years of silence, then Pokémon: Wild Card

The twenty-third feature film came out in Japan on December 25, 2020, and nothing followed. As of September 3, 2026, five years, eight months, and nine days have passed since that release, and six calendar years will have gone by without a new movie: none from 2021 to 2025, and none in 2026 either, since the next one is not expected before 2027. The three official lists stop at the same place: the franchise's Japanese site shows nothing after Coco (2020), the French site nothing after "2021 — Secrets of the Jungle", and Poképédia still numbers twenty-three movies. Between 1998 and 2020, the saga had never skipped a single year.

What broke has a precise shape: a July release in Japanese theaters, held twenty-two times from 1998 to 2019, which the pandemic had already moved once, to December 2020. No public statement from The Pokémon Company or from studio OLM explains why that yearly appointment was never resumed : neither the official sites, nor Poképédia, nor Bulbapedia quote one. The only established fact is the absence itself, and it is better to say so than to invent a cause for it.

What took its place: series, not movies

The TV series, for its part, never stopped. Pokémon Horizons: The Series, including the first season which began in Japan on April 14, 2023 on TV Tokyo, is up to three seasons on the Western side and is still airing weekly in Japan, with a new arc that started on May 22, 2026. The rest of the calendar was filled by short formats: Pokémon Evolutions from September 9 to December 23, 2021, Pokémon: Hisuian Snow from May 18 to June 22, 2022, Pokemon: Paldean Winds from September to December 2023, the series PokéMinutes opened on July 19, 2024 and still running, not counting the POKÉTOON episodes. Some fifteen mini-series and specials in six years, none feature-length in Japan, none in theaters.

Only one of these titles points to what comes next. Pokémon: Path to the Peak, four episodes aired in August 2023, is the first Pokémon animated production devoted to the trading card game : it takes place in a world where Pokémon do not exist as creatures, but where the franchise does, and it was nominated at the Annie Awards on January 11, 2024. Another one is stop-motion animated, Pokémon Concierge, on Netflix.

A platform commission was added in 2026: Pokémon Tales — The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d and Pichu, also stop-motion, produced by the British studio Aardman and directed by Tom Parkinson, announced for 2027 on Disney+, with a trailer unveiled on August 28, 2026 in San Francisco. Sirfetch’d crosses the Galar region there alongside a Pichu. Neither this series nor the movie announced two days later is made by OLM, the studio that animated the twenty-three feature films.

August 30, 2026: Pokémon: Wild Card

At the closing ceremony of the Pokémon World Championships, held in San Francisco from August 28 to 30, 2026, a 39-second teaser announced a new animated feature film, Pokémon: Wild Card. The Pokémon Company published a French-language news post the same day, and the trailer landed on the official French channel on August 31, 2026. The announcement mentions neither a sequel nor a number: it presents "the first animated feature film in years". Here is what is established as of September 3, 2026.

• Directed by Katsuhiko Kitada, character design by Akemi Hayashi, planning and production by STORY inc.
• Animation handled by CloverWorks.
• Japanese distribution attributed to Toho by Bulbapedia and Wikipedia; the movie's official site does not mention it.
• Release announced as "from 2027 onward", in theaters in Japan and worldwide. That is a floor, not a date.
• The hero is named Mikiya, wears a yellow hood that makes him look like a Mimikyu, and plays the card game.

The official French synopsis says that the movie "tells the thrilling story of a Pokémon TCG player and his partner Mimikyu. When the time comes to lay their cards on the table, will they rise to the challenge and reach their goals?" It is the franchise's first feature film built on the card game rather than on the video games, and the first whose hero's partner is not Pikachu — Mimikyu is precisely the Ghost-type Pokémon that disguises itself as Pikachu to be loved. The setting of the announcement matches its subject: the World Championships, whose trading card tournament is the oldest event.

Three breaks, and a number no official source gives it

The movie breaks three continuities at once: it is the first Pokémon animated feature since 2020, the first whose hero is neither Ash Ketchum nor any of his variants, and the first to be neither animated by OLM nor produced by the "Pikachu Project" committee.

Hence a wobble in the vocabulary, which this page does not settle. The press and Wikipedia already speak of the "24th movie" ; The Pokémon Company gives it no number, Bulbapedia files it in a separate table outside its numbered list, Poképédia still had not opened a page about it as of September 3, 2026, and the three official lists cited above had not recorded it. The number may come one day; it is not given today.

What the announcement doesn't say matters at least as much. For France, no distributor, no date and no dub have been announced : the film's AlloCiné listing reads "Release date unknown" with an empty distributor field, and the French press sums it up: "in France, no distributor, no date and no dubbed version have been confirmed." The running time, the voice cast, the music and the screenwriter haven't been announced either. We know who is making this film and what it is about; we don't yet know when or how we will get to see it.

This is the section that will move first: everything in it is current as of September 3, 2026, four days after the announcement, and the "twenty-three films released" count will stop being accurate the day Wild Card reaches theaters.

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Records, firsts and oddities of the Pokémon movies

The facts below were kept on a single criterion: each one carries a date, a number or a name that a source lets you go back and check. Only one of them is an officially certified record.

Two Guinness records, one of which nobody claims

Giratina and the Sky Warrior, released in Japan on July 19, 2008, sold 2,384,198 advance tickets, and Guinness World Records certified it on July 9, 2009 as the animated film with the most tickets sold in advance. It is the only certified record held by a feature film in the saga: the franchise holds others, but for the TV series and for the games. The film had opened on the same weekend as Ponyo by Hayao Miyazaki.

The franchise's second Guinness record is one nobody brags about. It appears in the 2004 edition and then in the 2008 Gamer's Edition of the Guinness Book of Records, for the highest number of photosensitive epileptic seizures caused by a television broadcast: it is episode 38 of the series, aired on December 16, 1997, once only, and nowhere but Japan.

What December 1997 left behind in the movies

The figures for that incident vary from source to source: Japanese fire departments counted 685 viewers taken away by ambulance, the Reuters news agency 729, the Japan Times 651. The rest belongs to the TV series, and is told in the feature on the first season.

The mark left on the feature films, though, is a lasting one. Studio OLM removed the strobing effects from Pikachu's electric attacks, and Porygon never got a role again, even though the explosion it was blamed for was Pikachu's doing and not its own : its only reappearance in the movies is a single shot in Pokémon Heroes, and its two evolutions exist only in the opening of Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice. One shot each, across twenty-three films.

The firsts: what the movies showed before the games

The habit of showing a creature before its game starts with the very first film. Donphan appears on screen in July 1998, sixteen months before Pokémon Gold and Silver , from November 21, 1999, and Pikachu's Vacation, screened alongside it, adds Marill, Snubbull and Mr. Mime. The same feature shows three moves that existed in no game yet: Shadow Ball, Rapid Spin and Rollout.

The other firsts are technical, and can be dated to the exact film. The 1998 film is the only Pokémon content ever released on LaserDisc, in Japan, on July 17, 1999. The feature films stayed on ink and cel through the ninth, while the TV series had already gone digital in 2002; The Rise of Darkrai is, in 2007, the first one made entirely with digital animation — CGI, for its part, would not arrive until the twenty-second film. Giratina and the Sky Warrior is the first content from the animated series broadcast in high definition, and I Choose You! the first mastered in 4K, for its run in American theaters.

Mistakes left on screen, cameos and behind the scenes

A few mistakes were never fixed. The first film colors a Nidoqueen like a Nidoking and has the same Machamp come out of its Poké Ball twice — only the high-definition remaster, released on Japanese Blu-ray on November 28, 2012, repaired the second one. The English credits of the fourth film read "THE POKEMAN COMPANY". In the sixth, Butler orders his Dusclops to use a move called "Capitata", which does not exist: the error comes from the international script, and every dub copied it. And in the twenty-third, wild Cherrim stay in Sunshine Form in the rain.

The cameos, for their part, make up a twenty-year scavenger hunt. A mother and her daughter run through four films — the eighth, the tenth, the eleventh and the fourteenth — then stop appearing from the seventeenth on. The playable heroes of the games turn up in at least four films: Brendan in the sixth, the ninth and the eleventh, Lucas in the eleventh, Ethan in the thirteenth, where he battles Ash Ketchum with a Donphan just as the 1998 opening already did. The crossover works the other way too: three Trainers from Diamond, Pearl and Platinum reuse the Japanese names and the teams of Butler and Diane, of Rebecca and of Lizabeth, characters from the sixth, seventh and ninth films — the English translation never caught it, and those names did not change in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

The rest is a matter of behind-the-scenes. Mewtwo owes his castle to The Phantom of the Opera : screenwriter Takeshi Shudo built the character that way when he learned that Masachika Ichimura, the Phantom of the 1988 Japanese production, would be voicing him. Eleven Pokémon appear on the English poster of the first film without showing up on screen even once. Tomiko Suzuki, the Japanese voice of Jirachi, died of acute heart failure on July 7, 2003, twelve days before the sixth film opened, and it remains her last role. And Zoroark: Master of Illusions had its entire prologue cut by Cartoon Network, without the agreement of The Pokémon Company International, which had it restored as of February 16, 2011.

One last reflex is worth keeping: the most widespread legends about the saga do not survive fact-checking. The one about a secret English dub of episode 38 goes back to a sentence added to Bulbapedia without a source on February 27, 2005, picked up by Wikipedia the following year and then by Poképédia, while the first recording director of the American dub says the opposite: airing that episode was never even on the table.

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Where to start when you are new to these movies

Twenty-three feature films, and no obligation to start with the first one : your entry point depends entirely on what you came looking for. Here are four doors, one per type of viewer, decided on how the films were actually received and on what can be watched in France as of September 3, 2026.

You have never seen any of it: start with the twentieth. I Choose You! goes back to Ash Ketchum's very first day and assumes no knowledge of the series or the movies. It is free on M6+, and it holds 3.4 out of 5 from 316 viewer ratings on AlloCiné, the second best of the six French listings surveyed. What upset longtime fans in 2017 — Misty and Brock being replaced — does not bother a newcomer: there is nobody for them to miss.

You want the best-looking film: go for the twenty-third. Secrets of the Jungle is the most recent of the twenty-three, and it is its setting that the press remembered: Écran Large, the only in-depth French press review identified for a Pokémon film released after 2001, gives it 3.5 out of 5 on October 11, 2021 and calls the Okoya Forest "the most breathtaking thing in the film". It also earns 3.5 out of 5 from 103 viewer ratings, the best of those same six AlloCiné listings. Two caveats: it is not free, and the same reviewer faults Netflix for serving the English track as the original-language version.

You are here for the lore: come in through the tenth. The Rise of Darkrai opens the Sinnoh trilogy, the only run in the saga you really have to watch in order: Sinnoh mythology in three evenings, free on M6+. The tenth was also voted the best film of its cycle by Japanese audiences in the official poll of February 2021.

You are watching with a child: skip the first film and go for the twenty-first. Pokémon: The First Movie is described by Poképédia as the darkest of the saga, and Common Sense Media gives it only one star out of five, judging its message of cooperation drowned out by the violence. The Power of Us does exactly the opposite: a standalone adventure, with no traveling companions you need to know. Among the films of the saga that carry a percentage on Rotten Tomatoes, it is the best rated by critics, and it earns 7.3 out of 10 from Metacritic users, across sixteen votes. It is free on M6+.

One recommendation, finally, remains impossible to follow in France: Pokémon Heroes, which Japanese audiences ranked first twice and which is precisely the only one of the twenty-three with no legal online offering here.

One last marker before you choose: three of the four films recommended here can be watched for free, with only Secrets of the Jungle requiring a subscription. The service-by-service breakdown, and the deadline hanging over that free access, come further down.

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The whole Pokémon filmography at a glance

Twenty-three feature films, two timelines and a twenty-fourth film with no number : the heart of this page fits in the seventeen lines below. The Japanese run keeps an almost perfect release calendar, one film a year from 1998 to 2020 and nearly always in July; the French timeline never followed the same curve, and it is the gap between the two that gives this page its subject. The rest comes down to production constants — one studio, one distributor, one director — and to exceptions you can count on one hand.

Every row in the table restates a fact established above, with its number and its date; the section it comes from gives the source, the disagreements between encyclopedias and the caveats that each count calls for. None of these numbers is an estimate : the ones that were missing, starting with the budgets of films 4 through 23, were left out rather than approximated. And everything about availability is current as of September 3, 2026: catalogs are renegotiated constantly, the one that carries seventeen films in France today expires on July 15, 2027, and the total of twenty-three films will stop being accurate the day Wild Card comes out.

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In short

Twenty-three feature films in twenty-two years, all animated by the OLM studio and distributed in Japan by Toho, nearly all released on a Saturday in July: that regularity is what makes this saga easy to read, and what makes its exceptions stand out. France followed a different timeline : three movies in theaters between April 5, 2000 and June 13, 2001, then twenty more that arrived on DVD, on television and on streaming platforms, with an average delay of 493 days across the twenty-three movies, and up to 2,139 days for the fourth. Since December 25, 2020, no new feature film has been released.

The one coming next will look like none of the twenty-three. Announced on August 30, 2026 for a release "starting in 2027", Pokémon: Wild Card is made neither by OLM nor by the Pikachu Project committee, has neither Ash as its hero nor Pikachu as a partner, and tells the story of the trading card game. No official source has given it a number in the series yet, and France has no announced distributor, date or dub.

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In the shop

The creatures that headline the posters each have their own section. Mewtwo to Mew, who share the first movie and its 2019 remake, with Mew headlining the eighth alongside Lucario and Mewtwo returning in the sixteenth, account for about thirty products between them ; Lucario, the star of the 2005 movie, has around fifteen. The Legendary and Mythical Pokémon section brings together the other headliners, from Rayquaza to Kyogre. Pikachu, in all twenty-three movies without exception, holds the biggest section in the shop, with nearly two hundred products.

On the human side, the Ash collection features the hero's jacket, cap and team, while the Team Rocket collection supplies the outfits of Jessie, James and the grunts — in the cast of all twenty-three movies without exception. The costumes and the posters complete the picture.

See Legendary and Mythical Pokémon

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Explore the Pokémon universe

This page is part of a series of guides covering the whole Pokémon universe:

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Frequently Asked Questions