Dragon Ball movies in order

The classic era produced four films between 1986 and 1996: Curse of the Blood Rubies, Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle, and Mystical Adventure retell the manga's opening arcs with changed villains and compressed plots, while The Path to Power (1996) retells the Red Ribbon stretch in a visibly different, GT-era art style for the manga's tenth anniversary. All four are alternate tellings, worth owning as variations rather than chapters.

The Z era settled into a rhythm of roughly two films a year from 1989 to 1995, thirteen in this stretch plus the Broly and Fusion films fans rank highest: Dead Zone, The World's Strongest, The Tree of Might, Lord Slug, Cooler's Revenge and its sequel, Super Android 13, Broly The Legendary Super Saiyan, Bojack Unbound, Broly Second Coming, Bio-Broly, Fusion Reborn, and Wrath of the Dragon. Almost none fit the television timeline cleanly, and Japanese guidebooks place them in parallel worlds, a framing the Library's GT and timeline pages return to.

The modern era restarted the line in 2013: Battle of Gods and Resurrection F were written with Toriyama's direct involvement and were absorbed into Super as its first arcs, and Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2018) reintroduced Broly and Gogeta into the continuing story, becoming the franchise's highest-grossing film at the time. Super Hero (2022) followed as a Gohan and Piccolo film in full 3D CG, a production choice that divided audiences while the story was later retold in the Super manga.

Collecting the films is a study in formats: Japanese releases span LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-ray with differing extras, Western releases were historically edited and rescored before Funimation's later uncut lines, and the Z films' posters, drawn for Toho's seasonal anime fairs, are among the most traded pieces of Dragon Ball paper. The Library's home video page covers set-by-set differences for the series; the films reward the same edition-by-edition attention.