2019 Pokémon: Detective Pikachu was a worldwide hit big enough for Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Entertainment, and The Pokémon Company to warrant a sequel, and yet fans of the pocket monsters entered 2023 with little to no update on what might be next for the burgeoning live-action franchise. But now we finally have an idea: deadline reports that Legendary is in negotiations with a new creative team to take on the theory Pokémon: Detective Pikachu 2.
According to the report, Jonathan Krisel, co-creator of the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia and the FX series Basketslikely takes over from original director Rob Letterman, while Chris Galletta (The kings of summer) is now busy with scripting tasks. It’s unclear if Ryan Reynolds would return to voice Pikachu – the end of Detective Pikachu certainly raises questions about how exactly that would be possible – but Deadline suggests the Deadpool actor would have a role to play based on the film’s direction.
Earlier this year, in our search for answers about the status of the dormant sequel, Legendary told Polygon that the film was still in active development – as it was in 2019. Detective Pikachu premiered, legendary hired writer Oren Uziel, who had written the script Spring street 22 and a sketch of Sonic the Hedgehog, to work on a sequel to the film. Uziel representatives told Polygon that although he wrote an outline and screenplay for the film, he was no longer involved with the film. Krisel and Galletta could be working on Uziel’s design or starting over, but as of now there’s no idea of a timeline for the actual movie, which has no release date at this point.
Mucking out the works is an imploded relationship between Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros.; since the release of Detective PikachuLegendary has left the film studio as main distributor and has signed a new deal with Sony Pictures. Detective Pikachu is expected to stay with WB. Meanwhile, Netflix continues to be a player in the Pokémon content game, with a brand new stop-motion Pokémon anime for 2023 and a live-action series reportedly in development.
The big question: which comes first, the new Detective Pikachu movie or the sequel to the game that Nintendo announced in 2019 and that didn’t come out either?
