Pokémon: Wild Card Announced as Franchise’s 2027 Theatrical Return

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The Pokémon Company has confirmed that the franchise will return to cinemas in 2027 with a new feature-length film titled Pokémon: Wild Card. The announcement was made during the closing ceremony of the 2026 Pokémon World Championships, held at the Chase Center in San Francisco, bringing to a close a weekend of competitive play across the trading card game, video games, Pokémon GO and Pokémon UNITE. The reveal capped off a year of celebrations marking the franchise's 30th anniversary, and organisers used the closing event to signal what lies ahead once the championship crowds have gone home.

A short teaser accompanying the announcement suggests the film will take a markedly different approach to previous Pokémon movies. Rather than opening on a conventional battle between trainers and their creatures, the footage centres on a game of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, with cards spread across a table between two competitors. One of the players, shown wearing a yellow hoodie, appears alongside Mimikyu, a ghost-and-fairy-type Pokémon first introduced in the Sun and Moon games. Mimikyu is known for concealing its true form beneath a crude, homemade Pikachu costume, and its yellow rag-like disguise appears to echo the player's outfit in the teaser. Beyond this pairing, no plot details, voice cast or full character line-up have yet been revealed.

Behind the scenes, the film will be directed by Katsuhiko Kitada, whose credits include work on The First Slam Dunk, Attack on Titan and Naruto: Shippuden, with character designs by Akemi Hayashi, known for Banana Fish and Lazarus. Production is being handled by CloverWorks, the Japanese animation studio behind Spy x Family and Bocchi the Rock. Wild Card will be the franchise's first new theatrical feature since Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle, which premiered in Japanese cinemas in 2020 before reaching international audiences via Netflix in 2021. For audiences seeking an original film released simultaneously in cinemas worldwide, the wait has been longer still: the last such release was 2018's Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us, which only had a limited international run through Fathom Events outside Japan.

The timing places Wild Card within a broader wave of franchise activity. Next year is also set to bring Winds and Waves, the tenth generation of the core Pokémon video games, meaning 2027 will see the series expand simultaneously on screen and in games. The apparent decision to build a film around the trading card game, rather than the more familiar trainer-and-battle formula, arrives at a moment when the card game has been prominent throughout the franchise's anniversary year, with some of its strongest competitive players having just contested world titles in San Francisco.

Where outlets differ

Source 1 (Variety) provides the fuller production breakdown — naming director Katsuhiko Kitada, character designer Akemi Hayashi and studio CloverWorks, plus their prior credits — and situates the film against the franchise's release history, including the limited 2018 Fathom Events run and the 2027 video game releases Winds and Waves. Source 2 (Collider) omits these production credits entirely and instead frames the story around the surprise and scale of the announcement itself, emphasising that it capped a 'packed' closing ceremony at Chase Center and describing in more detail the range of competitions (TCG, VGC, GO, UNITE) held that weekend and the Sunday finals.

Source 2 places much greater emphasis on the significance of the trading-card-game framing, explicitly calling it a departure from the franchise's traditional battle-first storytelling and suggesting card play may be woven into the plot itself — an interpretive point Source 1 does not make, sticking instead to a more factual description of the teaser's imagery.

• variety.com
• collider.com