Legendary Entertainment and The Pokémon Company has partnered to launch the first-ever Pokémon live-action film franchise, starting off with a film based on Detective Pikachu.
Detective Pikachu was first introduced in Nintendo’s adventure video game, Great Detective Pikachu in Japan, earlier this year.
The game is a spin-off in the Pokémon franchise, in which players work with a talking Pikachu to solve mysteries.
Details on how the story of live-action Detective Pikachu will be told are being kept under wraps for the moment.
The film will be fast-tracked for production start in 2017.
Pokémon was created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1995 is centered on fictional creatures called “Pokémon“, which humans, known as Pokémon Trainers, catch and train to battle each other for sport.
The Pokemon franchise began as a pair of video games for the original Game Boy. The franchise now spans video games, trading card games, animated television shows and movies, comic books, and toys.
With over 279 million video games sold worldwide, 21.5 billion TCG cards shipped to 74 countries, animated series spanning 19 seasons, Pokemon is the second-most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, behind only Nintendo’s Mario franchise.
Universal Pictures will handle distribution of the live-action film outside Japan as it has done with Legendary’s other films for years. The Pokémon Company’s long time movie collaborator, Toho, will handle distribution of the film franchise in Japan, as it had similarly done in its partnership with Legendary on the iconic monster reboot for Godzilla.
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