The Pokémon movies have been a fixture of Japanese summers since Mewtwo Strikes Back opened in July 1998: twenty-three animated features between 1998 and 2020, nearly all of them released in the school holidays alongside the television series, each built around a Legendary or Mythical Pokémon making its debut, and – for the first eighteen – preceded by a Pikachu short. In the West they have led a stranger life. The first three were Warner Bros. cinema releases, Pokémon Heroes in 2003 was the last to reach American screens for fourteen years, a decade of films went straight to television and DVD, and the series came back to cinemas through Fathom Events for I Choose You! and The Power of Us before moving to Netflix for the two most recent entries.
Two more films sit outside that run. Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) is the first live-action Pokémon film, made in Hollywood by Legendary and based on the Nintendo 3DS game rather than the anime, and Pokémon: Wild Card, announced in August 2026 and due from 2027, is a new animated film built around the Trading Card Game, with a new hero, a new studio and no Ash. Both are listed at the end of the page.
Every film has its own page here, written to the same plan: the full story, where it sits in relation to the anime (which episodes it falls between, who Ash was travelling with and what was in his team), the major and minor characters, every Pokémon making its anime debut, the voice cast in English and Japanese, a trailer, the promotional trading cards given away in cinemas, the posters and the DVD and Blu-ray covers from around the world, trivia, errors, and how the critics and the box office received it.
The films are listed below in release order and grouped by the series that was on television when each one came out – start at the top to follow them in sequence, or jump to the era you grew up with. Not sure where to begin? Mewtwo Strikes Back is the one everybody has seen, I Choose You! retells Ash and Pikachu’s first days for the twentieth anniversary, and The Power of Us is the best-reviewed of the lot.
