Detective Pikachu: Spoiler-Free Thoughts On World Building

I went into Detective Pikachu with high hopes. Or maybe I should say fortified hopes. The bar for video game movies is pretty low. Everybody cites Super Mario Bros. for good reason, and the upcoming Sonic movie seems to be vying for such a throne of disregard.*

There is a balancing act in bringing a property to a new medium, respecting the core audience while welcoming a new one. Director Rob Letterman and company managed that balance incredibly well. One of the most important elements of its success is the care that was taken in bringing the audience to the world of Pokémon. In the trailer for Sonic, the titular hedgehog finds himself in our world – the Earth we are familiar with (or at least close enough to it.) There seems to be a fear of greater audiences becoming confused about an alternate reality, or worse, embarrassed about the subject. Super Mario Bros. did as much as they could to “ground” the Mushroom Kingdom, Masters of the Universe found it necessary to bring He-Man and crew to Earth, Wanted did everything in its power to remove itself from anything too superhero-y, and so on.

In Detective Pikachu, we are in the world of the games and the anime. No questions, no second-guessing, and very little explanation.** We get a little exposition here and there, but how the characters behave in their world established what was normal and what was farfetch’d. This not only served to please longtime fans of the series but trusted new audiences to follow along.

My wife Jamie and I saw the movie for our first Alamo Drafthouse experience. It was incredible. Food and drink service during a movie is cool enough as it is, but the waitstaff literally crouches to approach your table so as not to disrupt your experience. We were in awe and we were grateful and the pizza was good and how can you not appreciate bottomless popcorn. Oh, and jalapeños were an option for the popcorn in addition to butter and heck if that didn’t turn out to be our new favorite way to eat popcorn. Oh right, the movie.

Jamie is not a gamer and doesn’t/didn’t watch the show when she was younger, so her appreciation for Pokémon is through my excitement. I’ll often ask her to name my Pokémon and we are playing the Detective Pikachu game together. She is not intimately familiar with the world and she still had a great time watching the movie. Not as great a time as I had, sure, but she followed along just fine and we talked about the plot on the drive home just like any other movie.

Building a new world from scratch isn’t new to cinema, but for some reason when video games or comic books are adapted, producers panic. Hopefully, the success of Detective Pikachu will ease some of that panic, but probably not. It’s more likely that the Pokémon Company has a clear vision for its property, not unlike the MCU. I can’t wait for my return trip to Rhyme City. Or maybe Kanto. Is Alola too much to ask?

*I enjoy Super Mario Bros. and will likely enjoy the Sonic movie for reasons I wouldn’t describe as ironic, but certainly not in the way that the filmmakers intended.

**Did you notice that there was no product placement in the movie? Like, you never see a Pepsi logo on a billboard or the golden arches in the background? It’s all in-world products, Silph Co., Berry Juice, and whatnot. Apparently they were very committed to maintaining the reality of the world. Ryan Reynolds mentioned in an interview that some of his ad-libs were cut or altered because he made reference to something that doesn’t exist in the world of Pokémon.