The Pokémon Company confirmed a new entry in its long dormant film franchise on August 31, 2026. It unveiled Pokémon: Wild Card and set a worldwide 2027 release.
The Pokémon Wild Card movie was announced during the closing ceremony of the 2026 Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco, alongside a short teaser trailer.
The teaser shows a trading card game player dressed in a yellow hoodie modeled on Mimikyu. Mimikyu is the ghost and fairy type Pokémon introduced in Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon.
It disguises itself as Pikachu, the franchise mascot, hiding its true form under a ragged yellow costume. The clip does not reveal the player’s face or name. That leaves the character’s identity as the biggest open question from the reveal, and fans have already started guessing online.
The World Championships drew competitive players from dozens of countries to San Francisco for the trading card game and video game finals. The Pokémon Company has used the event’s closing ceremony before to break franchise news.
This year it chose the same stage to confirm the movie’s existence for the first time. Competitors and fans watching the stream got the reveal before any press release went out. Clips of the teaser spread across social media within minutes of the ceremony ending, driven mostly by speculation about the hooded player’s identity.
Who is making the Pokémon Wild Card movie
Katsuhiko Kitada will direct. Kitada previously worked on The First Slam Dunk, Attack on Titan, and Naruto: Shippuden. Akemi Hayashi, known for character design on Banana Fish and Lazarus, is handling character design on the film.
CloverWorks, the Japanese animation studio behind Spy x Family and Bocchi the Rock!, will produce it. None of the three has worked on a mainline Pokémon film before. That marks a break from the animators who handled the franchise’s earlier movies.
The first new Pokémon film since 2020
Wild Card is the first Pokémon movie made since 2020’s Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle. That film opened in Japanese theaters before streaming worldwide on Netflix in 2021.
The last Pokémon film to reach theaters globally was 2018’s Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us, distributed in limited release outside Japan through Fathom Events. Neither film matched the theatrical reach of earlier entries such as Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, which played in wide release worldwide in 2019.
The gap since 2020 is the longest stretch without a new Pokémon film in the franchise’s history. Executives have not said whether Wild Card will get a full theatrical run.
They also have not confirmed if it will follow the streaming-first pattern of Secrets of the Jungle. Either path would shape how many people see the finished film in theaters, and how soon.
The announcement lands as the franchise closes out its 30th anniversary year. 2027 will also bring Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves, the tenth generation of core Pokémon games.
The film and the next mainline titles are on track to arrive around the same time. That overlap mirrors past years when a new film accompanied a fresh generation of games and merchandise. No plot details, voice cast, or a firm release month have been confirmed yet.