The Criterion Channel is adding Neon Genesis Evangelion, Evangelion: Death (True) and The End of Evangelion on 1 September, dropping Hideaki Anno’s 1995 series into a catalogue better known for Kurosawa retrospectives and restored New Wave cinema.
What Is Landing, and When
All three arrive on the same date, according to Anime News Network. GKIDS holds the licences, having picked up the television series and both films in 2020, and has been steadily rebuilding Evangelion’s legitimate availability in North America ever since.
A Long Road Back
Evangelion spent most of two decades difficult to watch legally outside Japan. The last North American home video release was ADV Films’ DVD editions in 2004 and 2005, after which the rights lapsed into a long silence. GKIDS and Fathom Events put the films back into US cinemas in December 2022, screened in Japanese with English subtitles, and Netflix currently carries the series.
Why It Matters
Criterion is a canon-maker. Getting shelved next to Kurosawa and Varda is not the same as getting a streaming slot, because the whole proposition of the label is that someone has decided this is worth preserving and arguing about. Anime has had a thin presence in that catalogue, and Evangelion is a defensible place to widen it: a 1995 television series that broke its own genre in public and then made a film to argue with its own audience.
The catch is the obvious one for anyone reading this from Sydney. The Criterion Channel is a US and Canada service. On 1 September nothing at all changes about what I can legally stream here, which is a familiar shape of good news.
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