My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission

Note: This review contains spoilers for My Hero Academia.

After ten long years, the ever-popular My Hero Academia has reached its conclusion. This incredible milestone reminded us that although we had kept up with both the manga and anime, we still hadn’t seen the series’ third film from 2021, World Heroes’ Mission, despite owning the Blu-ray for quite a while. In honor of the manga’s finale, we thought we’d finally go back and take a look at this film and see what we had missed. Unfortunately, while it does continue the trend of incredible animation, certain developments make the story less satisfying than the previous film, Heroes Rising.

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising

While modern juggernaut My Hero Academia doesn’t show any signs of stopping anytime soon, the current hiatus with the anime, at the time of this writing, necessitated catching up with the story through the manga. This turned out to be a good choice, since the series’ second feature film, Heroes Rising, takes place within the manga’s timeline. Although I missed the limited US theatrical screening, I did obtain the film on Blu-ray and watched it as soon as I could. Overall, it’s an improvement over the previous film, Two Heroes, but a specific element of the finale left me scratching my head.

My Hero Academia: Two Heroes

Since it began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2014, My Hero Academia, a manga about a boy named Izuku Midoriya born Quirkless (without superpowers) in a world where just about everyone has a Quirk, has been highly successful, spawning a popular anime series, three spinoff manga, two video games and a feature film, Two Heroes, with a second film, Heroes Rising, due later this year (the popularity in the US was also such that it almost shut down San Diego Comic-Con 2018). Two Heroes, the subject of this review, saw theatrical runs in both Japan and the US in 2018 and released to positive reviews from critics and grossed nearly $28 million dollars worldwide. While I hadn’t seen the movie during the limited US theatrical run, I did buy it on Blu-ray, but didn’t watch it until right after I had seen Episode 58 of the anime, which served as a lead-in, through a Toonami broadcast. Now that I have seen it, I found it a worthy addition to the My Hero Academia universe, despite a lack of accessibility.