Are Non-Canon Anime Films Worth It?
Anime movies are nothing new and after distributors like Funimation, Crunchyroll, and GKids popularized theatrical events centered around them, they've only become more common. What hasn't quite changed is the movies themselves, specifically anime films based on long-running shonen series with original plots disconnected from the main story.
Around the time that Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F made $8.4 million in North America, new theatrical releases for anime started to expand more and more. It's hard to imagine Jujutsu Kaisen 0 being the theatrical success it is without early successes in the 2010s that paved the way for more anime releases in theaters. Of course, plenty of these films have been original films that aren't tethered to existing series, like the success of Your Name or A Silent Voice. However, stuff like the My Hero Academia movies, while entertaining and popular, can often get mixed reception because they are made to feel disconnected from the overall story and arguably pointless.
The Final Evangelion Movie is Coming To Theaters
Whether it's Dragon Ball, Detective Conan, or Naruto, every now and again popular shonen series get anime films that tell new stories with often different directors and bigger budgets. They are film events in the purest sense, offering an experience that is definitively the show people know and love but heightened because it's on the big screen.
The problem is that very few of these are definitively canon, at least at first. Dragon Ball might be able to adapt the same story in its TV anime later and canonize it, but other shonen just let sleeping dogs lie. It's even easier when the film stories create entirely original characters and aren't relying on existing popular characters.
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