The End of Evangelion

The End of Evangelion arrives in Japanese theaters on 19 July 1997 as the second film in the franchise and the last new Evangelion animation until the Rebuild tetralogy. Written by Hideaki Anno, scored by Shirō Sagisu, and produced by GAINAX with Production I.G, the 87 minute feature picks up after Episode 24 and supplies the television series with an alternate conclusion. Its structure mirrors the show: two segments of roughly 45 minutes each, "Episode 25': Air" directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki and "Episode 26': Sincerely Yours" directed by Anno, each carrying a secondary English title in the tradition of the broadcast episodes. The producers regard the film either as a replacement ending or as a grounded external account of the finale the show staged almost entirely inside its characters' minds, an approach shaped in large part by the original production's time and budget limits.

In the first segment, SEELE launches its endgame and JSSDF troops storm NERV headquarters. Asuka, shaken out of her despair, meets the Mass Production Eva series in a fight to the death. The second segment brings Shinji before Lilith, where the destiny of the world hangs on a single decision, and his private torments shape the choice he makes.

The project grows out of Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, released four months earlier, whose REBIRTH half was meant to be the complete ending but could not be finished in time. "Air" builds on the script first written for the television version of Episode 25, and the finished film later becomes the back half of Revival of Evangelion. A persistent legend paints the movie as Anno's revenge on fans angry about the broadcast ending; in reality it sits closer to the conclusion originally conceived for the show, which budget and censorship pressures pushed aside, and the threatening letters flashed on screen were written by staff for legal reasons, most of them modeled on praise rather than hostility. Asuka's closing line, "Kimochi warui", emerges from a blunt exchange between Anno and actress Yuko Miyamura after he rejected every reading of a very different scripted line; to capture the strained delivery, Shinji's actress Megumi Ogata choked Miyamura by mutual agreement and accidentally knocked her down, producing the coarse final take. A far longer live action sequence, set ten years on and featuring the actresses as their characters in a world without Shinji, was shot but cut, surviving only in the theatrical trailer. Anno also wrote a second English language song, "Everything You've Ever Dreamed", centered on Shinji and Asuka's relationship, which went unused in favor of "Komm, süsser Tod".

The film takes in 2.47 billion yen and finishes as the fourth biggest Japanese feature of 1997, with distributor rentals around 1.5 billion yen, roughly 12 million dollars at the time. Critics single out its animation, direction, editing, screenplay, soundtrack, emotional power, and themes. It holds a 92 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an 8.2 on IMDb, and a 4.4 out of 5 on Letterboxd, where it has stood as the top rated animated film since March 2024 while ranking 23rd on the site's Top 250. Honors include the 1997 Animage Anime Grand Prix and a Japan Academy Prize recognizing the year's biggest public sensation. Cut magazine places it third among films, writer Patrick Macias also names it third in history and calls it the key anime film of the 1990s, Paste lists it 46th among anime movies, and Slant Magazine ranks it 42nd among science fiction films. GKIDS gives it a first ever United States theatrical run in March 2024, and it currently streams on Netflix with digital purchase options across major platforms.