Pokémon is heading back to theaters. The Pokémon Company announced Pokémon: Wild Card, a new feature-length animated film centered on the Pokémon Trading Card Game, during the closing ceremony of the 2026 Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco, with a worldwide release set for 2027.
It’s the latest expansion in a year that’s already seen Pokémon branch out well beyond games and cards, following our coverage of the Disney+ distribution deal bringing Aardman’s stop-motion series to Disney XD and the franchise’s 30th anniversary “What’s Your Favorite?” campaign earlier this year.
Wild Card is Pokémon’s first feature-length animated film in seven years, following Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle, which released in Japan in 2020 before reaching international audiences on Netflix in 2021. Rather than following a trainer’s journey through gyms and badges, the film centers on an aspiring Pokémon Trading Card Game player working toward becoming a champion, paired with Mimikyu, the Ghost and Fairy-type Pokémon known for disguising itself as Pikachu. The teaser trailer leans into that shift directly, opening on a card table rather than a traditional Pokémon battle, with the film’s lead shown wearing a yellow hoodie modeled after Mimikyu’s own disguise.
Katsuhiko Kitada is directing, coming off work on The First Slam Dunk, Naruto: Shippuden, and Attack on Titan. Akemi Hayashi is handling character designs, animation is being produced by CloverWorks, one of Japan’s top animation studios, and STORY inc. is producing. A Japanese theatrical release is confirmed, with other regional release plans still to be announced.
The Pokémon Company tied the announcement directly to this year’s World Championships, with President and CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara drawing a line between the film’s protagonist and the competitors who spent the weekend battling for a title at Chase Center. The timing lines up with Pokémon’s 30th anniversary celebrations, which have leaned heavily on the trading card game all year.
Centering a Pokémon movie on the card game instead of a trainer’s journey is a bigger shift than it might look at first. Every prior theatrical Pokémon film, going back to the original in 1998, has followed Ash or another trainer walking the same basic path toward becoming a Pokémon Master. Building a story around the TCG instead lines up with where the franchise’s competitive energy actually lives right now, and it gives Pokémon a way to tell a movie-length story that doesn’t lean on decades of established trainer lore to make sense.
