With Detective Pikachu about to bring Nintendo's beloved Pokemon franchise to the big screen in live-action, the producers hope to one day include the entire vast library of titular pocket monsters.
Legendary Entertainment is producing the upcoming live-action film, with an adaptation of the video games Pokemon Red and Blue also in development. According to Legendary producer Ali Mendes, the studio would love to include all 800 Pokemon currently in existence to the big screen.
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"[Pokemon is] such a rich universe. There are so many ways you can go inside of it. We're trying to get the first movie right, and then once we've done that, we'll see where we go from there, but absolutely. There are a lot of opportunities," admitted Mendes in an interview with IGN. "Even the Pokemon themselves, there are eight hundred of them. We're going to have a lot of them in [Detective Pikachu], but we want to play with all of them at some point.”
With this year's Pokemon Sword and Shield expected to add even more Pokemon to the franchise, Legendary will certainly have plenty of the popular creatures to choose from for future films.
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Directed by Rob Letterman, Detective Pikachu stars Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton, Ken Watanabe and the voice of Ryan Reynolds. The film opens in theaters on May 10.