Cinematics

Every animated cinematic in the Runeterra canon.

About cinematics

The cinematics are the most-watched Runeterra texts by a wide margin, and for many people they are the only ones. A season launch cinematic reaches an audience the short stories never will, which is why Riot uses them to set up the year rather than to decorate it.

They are also the hardest to read as canon. A cinematic compresses months into three minutes and is under no obligation to explain what it shows, so an event that gets one line in a biography can get a whole sequence here, and vice versa. Read against the written canon rather than instead of it.

Each entry below links to the story it belongs to where one exists, and the timeline places them in in-world order.

The production history matters when reading them. Riot has worked with several animation studios and built one of its own, and the house style of each is distinct enough that two cinematics about the same event can feel like different canons. They are not — but the tone is doing as much work as the plot.

Watch for what is not shown. A cinematic that ends on a held shot rather than a resolution is usually setting up a season, and the answer generally arrives in a short story months later rather than in another film.

How this index is filed

Every entry below is a work Riot published, linked to the original rather than summarised. The list is filtered the same way the rest of the Archive is: champion spotlights, cosmetic adverts, tournament recordings and storefront promos are filed out, so a search for cinematics returns cinematics and not a battle-pass trailer that happens to carry the same tag. What you see is the filtered set, not everything the database holds.

Each work is also filed by the zone it belongs to and placed on the in-world timeline, so the same entry can be reached three ways — by form here, by place from the zone pages, and by date from the timeline. Ordering here is by publication, newest first, which is the order Riot released them rather than the order they happen in.

The rest of the Archive

The archive is one set of works cut several ways. Cinematics is one form; the indexes below hold the others, and every entry in all of them is filed by zone and placed on the in-world timeline.

The Archive of Runeterra is the full index, the timeline puts it in in-world order, and the codex wings describe the world these works are set in rather than the works themselves.

Latest cinematics