Pokémon closed out its World Championships in San Francisco on Sunday night with the announcement nobody had on their card: a new theatrical anime film, the first in roughly seven years, and it is not about a kid becoming a Pokémon Master. “Pokémon: Wild Card” arrives in 2027, it comes from CloverWorks, and the teaser opens on two people sitting across a table from each other playing the trading card game. No stadium. No starter. No rival with better hair. Just cards.
That is a genuinely strange swing for a franchise that has spent three decades running the same reliable engine, and it is the most interesting thing Pokémon has done on screen in years. The official synopsis frames it as the story of a Pokémon TCG player and his partner Mimikyu, and asks whether, when the time comes to put their cards on the table, they have what it takes to reach their goals. Read that again and notice what is missing. There is no mention of a journey, no gym badges, and no Ash Ketchum.
No stadium. No starter. No rival with better hair. Just cards.”
The teaser is short and it is deliberately withholding. It opens on the card match, introduces a teenage protagonist in a yellow hoodie cut to echo Mimikyu’s own ragged disguise, and keeps Mimikyu at his side throughout. The setting is grey and urban rather than the bright route-and-forest palette the series usually runs on, and the only Pokémon visible in the whole thing is that one Mimikyu. It ends on the kid looking straight down the lens, then a logo with an odd eye motif worked into it, then the words “2027 and beyond”. That last phrase is doing a lot of quiet work. A single film does not usually get announced with a plural timeframe bolted onto it. Either The Pokémon Company is planning more than one of these, or somebody wanted the door left open without committing to anything on stage. Both readings are interesting, and neither of them is what you do when you are quietly testing the water with a one off.
The talent list is the part that made us sit up. CloverWorks is animating, which is a studio with a real house style and a track record for putting genuine visual ambition into other people’s franchises. Katsuhiko Kitada directs, and his credits include unit direction on “The First Slam Dunk” and animation direction on “Attack on Titan”, neither of which is a children’s adventure show. Akemi Hayashi handles character design off the back of “Banana Fish” and “Lazarus”. Story Inc. produces. No writer has been announced yet, which is the one obvious gap in the credits.
Some grounding on how big a break this is. This is the twenty fourth Pokémon anime film, and the first to reach cinemas since “Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle”, which opened in Japan at the end of 2020 and reached most of the world through Netflix the following year. Seven years is an extraordinarily long silence for a property that used to ship a movie almost annually. Whatever the company has been working out in that gap, the answer it came back with was not another Ash film and not a soft reboot of the trainer formula.
It is also the second time in three years Pokémon has built screen fiction around the card game specifically, after the “Path to the Peak” miniseries that landed alongside Pokémon TCG Pocket. That one was a web series and easy to dismiss as a marketing exercise. A theatrical feature from CloverWorks with an “Attack on Titan” animation director is a different level of commitment, and it points at an audience the franchise has been quietly sitting on for years: the people who never stopped buying cards, who are now in their thirties, and who have money. It is worth remembering how relentless the old schedule was. Pokémon put out a theatrical film almost every single year from 1998 onward, twenty three of them, timed like clockwork to whichever generation of games was current. That machine simply stopped. The television side kept moving in the meantime, retiring Ash Ketchum and handing the series to new leads, and the films never followed it. Whatever was being worked out during those seven quiet years, the answer does not slot into the old pattern anywhere.
What we do not have yet is almost as notable. There is no release date, only 2027. The theatrical release is confirmed for Japan, and nobody has said anything about how the rest of the world gets it, which given the Netflix route the last film took is a live question rather than a formality. The protagonist has not been officially named, and we would encourage you to be sceptical of any name currently circulating, because the outlets do not agree and The Pokémon Company has not confirmed one. No other characters or Pokémon have been announced beyond Mimikyu.
Our read: choosing Mimikyu as the partner is the single most revealing decision in the whole teaser. Mimikyu is a Pokémon that wears a bad costume of a more popular Pokémon because it wants to be loved and cannot be looked at directly without hurting people. Pairing that with a sullen teenager in a hoodie shaped like the same costume, in a story about a card game where you win by playing what you are holding rather than by being the chosen one, is not subtle. It is also the first time in a very long while that a Pokémon film has looked like it might actually be about something other than the merchandise cycle it sits inside, which is not a sentence we expected to write about a movie announced at a card game tournament. Whether “2027 and beyond” means a series of these or the company hedging, we will take the swing.
What Do You Think? Is dropping the trainer formula for a card-game story a genuine creative reinvention, or a franchise chasing the demographic that already spends the most money? Does CloverWorks and an “Attack on Titan” animation director signal real ambition, or just a better-looking version of the same product? And after seven years away, is a theatrical Pokémon movie still an event, or has the series moved on without it?
Catch up properly: every Pokémon series and film in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Pokémon timeline.
See you on the next binge!
