My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission

The third feature reached Japanese theaters on August 6, 2021 after an announcement that March 27, and played Britain, Ireland, and North America from October 29. Kohei Horikoshi had suspected Heroes: Rising would close out the films, since it drew on an old concept for the manga's finale. A teaser campaign in November 2020 proved otherwise: the official accounts for the manga, the anime, and the movies each posted a fragment of one sentence, promising that someone would meet "the three musketeers", with links that assembled into a visual of Izuku, Katsuki, and Shoto in new stealth suits.

Continuity held across the crew for a third time. Bones animated and Toho released, direction fell to Kenji Nagasaki, the script to Yosuke Kuroda, character design to Yoshihiko Umakoshi, and the score to Yuki Hayashi, while Horikoshi again supervised and lent designs. Hikaru Taguchi, then editing the manga, served as an additional supervisor on the 105-minute picture. Asian Kung-Fu Generation supplied both the theme "Empathy" and an insert called "Flowers".

Volume World Heroes, the tie-in booklet of sketches, interviews, and a new Horikoshi chapter, was the first of its kind sold outside Japan; that chapter, Hawks: Soothe, leads directly into the film and later became the OVA Departure. Yoco Akiyama contributed another prequel to Weekly Shonen Jump, Endeavor's Mission, in which the trainees are tested by Endeavor before earning their places.

Humarise, a cult built on the Quirk Singularity Doomsday Theory, holds that powers will evolve past any hope of control and end humanity, and that only the Quirkless deserve saving. Its leader Flect Turn demonstrates by detonating a Trigger Bomb over a city, flooding it with gas that sends every Quirk berserk until civilians and heroes alike destroy themselves and everything near them. The few survivors are congratulated on their salvation.

The World Heroes Association answers with an off-books global task force raiding all twenty-five known branches simultaneously, All Might advising and students padding the ranks worldwide. Every raid succeeds and every raid comes up empty: no bombs, no leader. In Otheon, where Endeavor's trainees are stuck running errands, a jewel heist crosses paths with Rody Soul, a shantytown courier, and in the confusion of a nearby crash he walks off with the wrong briefcase, one belonging to the Humarise defector Alan Kay. Within hours the Otheon police, quietly infiltrated by the cult, brand Izuku a mass murderer and open fire on him in the street.

The two run for the Klayd border with the archer Beros hunting them, while Shoto decodes Izuku's message and pulls Katsuki along. Rody's history surfaces on the road: his father Eddie Soul, an engineer, seemed to abandon his children for Humarise, after which the family lost every home and friend it had. When Shoto and Katsuki catch up, a hidden compartment yields a puzzle box that Rody recognizes as his father's work, and inside sit a microSD card and a strange device.

Alan's recording lays out the real trap: the first bombing was bait to draw the world's best heroes onto the marked cities, where a simultaneous detonation would kill most of them and leave society to collapse on its own. The device shuts the bombs down permanently, and Eddie Soul built it, coerced like Alan with his children's lives and executed once his treachery surfaced. With two hours on the clock and no support, the four fly to the true base. Katsuki buries the Trigger-boosted Serpenters with Howitzer Impact before collapsing from blood loss, Shoto falls down a waterfall with Leviathan, and Izuku reaches Flect Turn, whose Reflect Quirk returns every attack at the same force it arrives with.

Bleeding out with five minutes left, Izuku watches Rody appear to change sides for a deal that would spare his siblings' city, then spots Pino, the bird that is Rody's Quirk made visible and his intentions along with it. The feint works. Izuku works out that every reflection drains Flect Turn's stamina, tells him the misery of his life came from surrendering to his Quirk rather than believing in it, and overloads Reflect with a barrage ending in United States of World Smash. Rody, shot on his way to the console, passes out before he can use the key; Pino slots it home in time, and every bomb goes dead.

Japan supplied $29.3 million and other territories $17.8 million, for a worldwide total near $47.03 million; Box Office Mojo lists $46,951,862.

Opening day in Japan brought $2.81 million, a figure 229.2% above what the previous film managed on its premiere, and the opening weekend's $8.51 million landed second. The run crossed one billion yen in its second weekend and reached ¥2.07 billion, close to $18.82 million, by its third, at which point it became the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. First place arrived in weekend four, slipped to fourth across weekend five, returned in weekend six, and from there the picture eased down the chart before dropping off in its tenth.

Abroad, the United States and Canada delivered $6.4 million on opening weekend for fourth place, Australia $169,268 for fifth, and the United Kingdom and Ireland $293,000 across 260 theaters. It ranks sixteenth among the best-selling anime films in North America.