BODY: For decades, a new Pokémon movie meant one thing: Ash, Pikachu, and a Legendary Pokémon on a collision course. The next one breaks that mold entirely. On August 31, The Pokémon Company announced "Pokémon: Wild Card," a feature film built not around the video games or the anime, but around the Pokémon Trading Card Game — and it hands the animation to CloverWorks.
It's the first new Pokémon movie in seven years, following 2019's remake Mewtwo Strikes Back: Evolution. That gap alone makes the project notable; that it centers on the TCG makes it genuinely unusual. The card game has quietly become one of the franchise's biggest engines, with the Pokémon TCG Pocket mobile app driving a fresh wave of global demand and card values reaching collector-frenzy levels over the past two years.
The choice of studio is the other headline. CloverWorks is not the name longtime fans associate with Pokémon — that role has long belonged to OLM. Instead, the franchise has tapped the studio behind Spy × Family, Bocchi the Rock!, and The Promised Neverland, a house celebrated for polished, character-driven productions rather than long-running kids' properties.
Details on story, cast, and release timing remain thin for now, with The Pokémon Company positioning the announcement as a first reveal. What's clear is the ambition: reframing a card game — objects on a table — into a cinematic narrative is a creative gamble few franchises would attempt.
The insider take
From Tokyo, this reads as The Pokémon Company diversifying its film strategy after closing the Ash era in the anime. Handing a flagship movie to CloverWorks signals a deliberate reach for an older, animation-literate audience — the same crowd fueling the TCG collecting boom rather than just the Saturday-morning demographic. Betting a movie on the cards, not the creatures, is a confident read of where Pokémon's money and cultural energy actually sit in 2026.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).