It’s official – a live-action Pokemon movie is in the works!
The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Thomas Tull’s Legendary Pictures, which is a division of China’s Dalian Wanda Group since January, and the Pokemon Co., will be launching the 1st Pokemon live-action film franchise based on “Detective Pikachu”, a new character in the Pokemon universe.
Just in case you didn’t know, “Detective Pikachu” is an adventure game for the Nintendo 3DS where the player portrays the role of a human assistant to Pikachu, a detective with above-average intelligence who is a self-styled private investigator.
It was also reported that Universal Pictures will handle the film’s distribution outside of Japan while Toho will handle the Japanese distribution.
Pokemon was first created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1995 and the beloved franchise extends a wide range of spin-offs including video games, trading cards, TV shows (anime), comic books (manga), and movies that revolve around the unique creatures that are collected by Pokemon Trainers, who then train them to battle for sport or keep them as pets.
The first Pokemon role-playing video game (RPG) was released in 1996 for Game Boy while the 1st film, titled “Pokemon: The First Movie – Mewtwo Strikes Back”, was released in 1998.
Since the launch of the Pokemon Go app, Nintendo’s stock has seen a massive jump of 25%. It’s no wonder Hollywood is jumping on this franchise at the height of its craze.
No plot details or a release date for the upcoming movie has been confirmed yet, but production is expected to start in 2017.
We’ll be updating this post with more information as soon as we get ’em details ?
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Rant.
