My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission Review - 8 Ups & 2 Downs
A surprising smash for Halloween weekend's biggest superhero movie.
With more and more people coming back to the movies, it's hardly a surprise to see box office numbers going up. What is surprising, however, is seeing a 2D anime movie with limited releases in only 1500 theatres taking fourth place in the box office over the opening weekend, and second after Dune on opening night.
With its surprisingly packed red carpet event and its considerable box office gains only growing, it's certainly a success story among anime films based on existing series IP. Though it suffers from some of the issues that come with making a movie that needs to pack in multiple seasons of lore, World Heroes Mission pulls the standalone film treatment perhaps the best out of all three My Hero Academia films. Despite its enormous and packed cast of characters, which the anime is known for, it mainly goes for an intimate buddy comedy action-adventure, which makes it stand out from its counterparts.
It may be a flawed film, but there's a lot to love with how it fits into the anime's canon while also being surprisingly newcomer friendly, with a lot of top tier animation, action, comedy, and visual and emotional storytelling that makes it feel universal.
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SPOILERS for My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission
11. Down: Most Of The Class Is Sidelined
The main complaint coming from longtime fans of the anime is that the many heroic high schoolers the anime follows, who are present in the film, are sidelined for most of the movie.
It's more an issue with the advertising than the film itself, which seems to know exactly how much it wants to use the characters in relation to the story - in this case, fairly little. Though Deku does call all his classmates by name near the finale, this might have just confused any viewers new to the franchise, given that their screentime was minimal.
It was perhaps the worst for the character of Uraraka, as well as Hawks, who were given a bit of a spotlight in the trailer, despite their roles in the film being just as minimal as the rest of Class A and B.
Though it does escape the trap of the first My Hero Academia movie, Two Heroes, in which juggling the entire class's presence in the film felt fairly contrived, its promise of focus on the large ensemble cast was not kept as it was in previous entry, Heroes Rising.