What are the Hunter x Hunter movies?
At the height of the 2011 anime's run, Madhouse produced two feature films in a single year. Hunter x Hunter: Phantom Rouge opened in January 2013, and Hunter x Hunter: The Last Mission followed in December 2013. Both use the 2011 series' cast and designs, both tell original stories, and between them they are the franchise's entire theatrical output: no films were made from the 1999 series.
Phantom Rouge carries the more interesting pedigree. Its story, in which Kurapika's stolen scarlet eyes and a resurrected Phantom Troupe member drive the plot, was developed from a draft Togashi wrote years earlier as a possible manga storyline and set aside. The film introduces Omokage, a former Troupe member who steals eyes and animates dolls of the dead, letting the production stage reunions the manga never allowed. Fans treat it as semi canonical for that reason: the events are the film's, the seed is the author's.
The Last Mission is a larger scale original: during a battle festival at Heavens Arena, a force of former Hunters led by Jed, a figure from Netero's buried past, attacks the Association with On, a resentment powered counterpart to Nen. It is the more action forward of the two films and the more divisive, since its new power system sits uneasily beside the manga's careful rules, but its portrait of Netero's compromised history gives it genuine thematic weight.
Both films performed respectably in Japan and were released internationally on home video and streaming with the 2011 dub cast in English editions. They sit outside every manga count and outside the television box sets, sold as their own discs, so a complete 2011 era video collection is the series set plus these two films, a fact listings occasionally blur by describing the films as bonus discs.
Watch them after the Yorknew material for Phantom Rouge and after the Election arc for The Last Mission's full context, or simply as double feature evidence of how big the reboot had become by 2013: a franchise that waited a decade for its second anime spent that anime's peak year releasing two films at once.
