The trailer opens on a kid and a Mimikyu. Then it cuts to a table set up for a game of Pokemon.
That’s the pitch. After seven years without a theatrical release, the franchise is coming back with an animated feature built around the trading card game, and it’s asking a question nobody at the company has bothered to answer in three decades: would the TCG still exist in a world where Pokemon are real?
Pokemon: Wild Card was announced during Pokemon XP, with a release window listed as “in 2027 and beyond.”
Read that window again. “2027 and beyond” is the kind of phrasing that means production delays or the timeline for international distribution could push this to 2028.
The staff list is the tell
CloverWorks is animating, the studio behind Spy x Family and The Elusive Samurai. Katsuhiko Kitada directs, whose credits include Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance. Character design comes from Akemi Hayashi, of Banana Fish.
That’s not a lineup you assemble for a routine anime tie-in.
And this one isn’t a tie-in at all. Wild Card will be the 25th movie in the franchise, counting 2019’s live-action Detective Pikachu, and the first since 2020’s Pokemon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle. It’s also the first animated Pokemon film without Ash/Satoshi, and the first to center the card game.
Every previous movie functioned as a spin-off of the anime. The original series wrapped in 2023. The franchise appears to have taken that as permission to go somewhere else.
The cards have been hiding in plain sight
Here’s the odd part. The Pokemon TCG has never been explicitly confirmed to exist inside the anime’s world. It shows up only in scraps.
In episode 73 of Pokemon The Series, “Bad to the Bone,” a few TCG cards appear briefly among Jessie’s possessions. They were edited out of the English version.
The villain of Pokemon The Movie 2000 owns an Ancient Mew card, which was also handed out at theaters when the film opened. Cute detail. Still not a confirmation.
No character has ever been shown playing the game on screen. Which could mean Wild Card takes place in a separate continuity from the anime. Or not. The franchise has never lost much sleep over continuity.
What Mimikyu is doing there
The trailer describes the boy as a “Pokemon TCG player,” and the protagonist, still unnamed, runs a Psychic deck with a Mimikyu card in it. So the bond probably works both ways: partner and playable.
The more entertaining question is who the antagonists are. Scalpers make Team Rocket look like a hobby project, and I wouldn’t rule them out.
There are 14 different products to buy, each with its own promo card and other TCG goodies.
Why now, and why cards
Plenty of big franchises are eyeing anime movies right now, after the money Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc pulled in. Pokemon got there first, decades ago. But its films leaned on the anime’s popularity, and that popularity has slipped.
The card game went the other direction. It keeps growing. Building an original story around one of the most profitable pieces of the whole operation isn’t a creative gamble so much as arithmetic.
Which brings it back to that table in the trailer, two players, cards down, no Ash anywhere.
