The Fairy Tail Movies
Two films, five years apart: one at the anime's first peak, one at the story's end.
Fairy Tail reached cinemas twice. Fairy Tail the Movie: Phoenix Priestess premiered on August 18, 2012, and Fairy Tail: Dragon Cry on May 6, 2017. Both are original stories rather than adaptations of manga arcs, built to stand beside the television series.
Their dates frame the franchise's arc neatly: the first film belongs to the years when the anime was television's version of the guild, and the second arrived as Mashima was drawing the manga's final chapters, eleven years after he had started it.
TWO FILMS, TWO MOMENTS
2012 and 2017Phoenix Priestess · August 18, 2012
The first film arrived three years into the television run, an original story built for the cinema while the anime was at its first peak. It premiered in Japan on August 18, 2012.
Dragon Cry · May 6, 2017
The second film premiered on May 6, 2017, in the manga's final months, a story set at the edge of the endgame the weekly chapters were then approaching. The guild's story on screen was now running beside its conclusion in print.
Between the films, the bundled DVDs
The screen catalogue is larger than two films and 328 episodes: through the early 2010s Kodansha bundled original anime DVDs with special editions of the manga, beginning with volume 26 in April 2011, with stories storyboarded by Mashima himself.