With over a thousand episodes of the anime, it’s impossible to separate the Pokemon games from the other types of media taking place in the Pokemon world. The series has been running on TV for several decades, but has evolved into many feature-length spin-offs starting with Pokemon: The First Movie in 1998.
With so many movies, though, only a few of them have received reviews or attention from most Pokemon fans. As a result, not every Pokemon movie is listed on Metacritic, but the ones they have are both some of the newest and most classic of the animated collection.
8 Pokemon The Movie: The Power Of Us
An important thing to know about Metacritic is that there needs to be a high density of reviews for a movie to get a specific rating. This means that many titles will have a few reviews and the ability for users to rate the film, but don’t have enough attention from fans and critics to give it a score out of 100.
Two Pokemon films fit into this category, both of which being some of the newest additions to the movie series. The first is Pokemon The Movie: The Power Of Us, a new original story featuring Ash and several new characters following Lugia during a small town’s Wind Festival. It lacks a full Metacritic rating, but appears hardly disliked with an average user rating of 6.6.
7 Pokemon The Movie: I Choose You!
The other movie without a Metacritic rating is Pokemon The Movie: I Choose You, a much stranger entry in the series. Rather than a new tale, this movie follows the first few episodes of the Pokemon series, featuring Ash as he starts his journey with Pikachu from Pallet Town.
This movie coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Pokemon series and is a beautiful recreation of its oldest roots. The movie came out in theaters and was most known during its release for a scene where Pikachu briefly speaks, but remains with no official Metacritic ratings besides an average user score of 7.7.
6 Pokemon 3: The Movie (22)
When it comes to the first five Pokemon movies, enough attention was on the films of the series to attract more official reviews. That said, while many are quite famous and beloved by Pokemon fans, their reviews are significantly less positive about these animated adventures.
This is best showcased by Pokemon 3: The Movie, also subtitled with Entei: Spell of the Unknown. This film has an astonishingly low rating of 22. The user review of 6.6, though, is likely a sign that fans of Pokémon surely enjoyed it.
5 Pokemon 4Ever (25)
Not too much higher is Pokemon 4Ever, featuring the appearance of Johto favorites Celebi and Suicune in 2001. This wasn’t the first appearance of Johto Pokemon in the anime, but this movie’s legendaries and time travel plot featuring the mysterious character Sammy hold a warm place in the hearts of long-time fans.
In terms of Metacritic reviews, however, it isn’t significantly higher than Pokemon 3: The Movie. Most of the reviews revolve around suggesting that parents not bother with it, while the user review of 7.1 proves that Pokemon fans are sure to still get value out of it.
4 Pokemon Heroes (27)
Much of why these scores are so low is because the reviews surrounding these movies are oriented towards parents, rather than kids and Pokemon fans. This is much because, in North America, these movies were releasing in theaters alongside several other films for kids and adults to compare with. Newer Pokemon movies are now straight-to-video releases outside of Japan, which typically receive fewer reviews.
As the last Pokemon film released in theaters, Pokemon Heroes follows the trend of Pokemon 3 and Pokemon 4Ever with a low score of 27 points. Nonetheless, it’s an impressively higher score compared to the other films, and a solid success before later films would be released as straight-to-video releases.
3 Pokemon: The Movie 2000 (28)
As we climb along the higher-reviewed Pokemon movies, it’s clear that the oldest films are generally the most admired. This is likely in part from having the original cast that most old fans grew up with, but also were more notable for their novelty.
This includes Pokemon: The Movie 2000, which featured Lugia and the Legendary Birds only a short few months after Pokemon Gold & Silver’s original release. This is also the only other movie centered on Ash’s original Kanto team, making it a highly nostalgic film among older fans.
2 Pokemon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back! (35)
As with many film series, the first-ever Pokemon movie is exceptionally more loved than any of its follow-ups. The film was a massive event, with many showings providing trading cards to kids who attended and tie-in toys at Burger King. It was unlike any other Pokemon movie, pulling in every Pokemon fan in the middle of their childhood.
Its rating isn’t high compared to most films, but at 35 it ranks significantly higher than any other movie based on the Pokemon anime. Its quality and popularity even led to a CGI remake in 2019, which lacks its own Metacritic rating but has an unusually low 6.6 for its average user score.
1 Detective Pikachu (53)
It perhaps isn’t surprising that a movie separate from the decades-long anime is the highest-rated Pokemon movie, but the success of Detective Pikachu is still plenty impressive. Many Pokemon fans enjoyed this live-action interpretation of the universe, but newer and more casual fans could still find fun in its fantasy and story.
Predictably, this helped the film reach a much higher score of 53, more than double the ratings of the third and fourth films in the series. It might not be part of the traditional anime, but there’s a clear interest by fans and critics in seeing new characters and stories within the Pokemon world on the big screen.