Gravity Falls creator and Guardians Of The Galaxy writer to pen the Pokémon movie
Apparently nobody’s told Legendary Entertainment that everybody is in love with Pokémon right now, and that its upcoming movie Detective Pikachu is going to sell a billion tickets even if it turns out to be nothing but 90 minutes of an actual mouse running around in a cage with a Sherlock Holmes hat taped to its head. In fact, it sounds like the studio—which recently acquired the film rights to the franchise—is actually trying to make its first live-action Pokémon movie good, with Variety reporting that Guardians Of The Galaxy screenwriter Nicole Perlman and Alex Hirsch, creator of Disney’s beloved Gravity Falls, are both in talks to write the script.
Perlman reportedly did some uncredited work on the script for Thor, before she became instant Marvel royalty by writing the blockbuster space comedy of 2014. She’s since been announced on a number of other projects, most notably Captain Marvel, currently set for a 2019 release. Meanwhile, Hirsch has been fairly quiet since Gravity Falls had its big finale back in February. If he signs on, Detective Pikachu would be his first major project since the world said goodbye to Dipper and Mabel Pines six months ago. (That being said, he’s clearly no stranger to the world of battle-prone pocket monsters, if those presidential candidate Pokémon he’s been drawing are anything to go by.)
Detective Pikachu was announced last month. The movie is apparently being based on the Japanese-only game Great Detective Pikachu, in which a young Pokémon trainer and their friend, a deep-voiced Pikachu wearing a deerstalker, solve crimes, in what sounds like a really strange premise even for a franchise that’s all about plucky pre-teens catching gods in tiny magical balls and making them fight each other for fun and cash.