Detective Pikachu’s Opening Weekend Takes $54 Million at the Box Office

Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment’s latest movie Pokémon Detective Pikachu is the company’s first Pokémon film to be theatrically released in nineteen years and has delivered a record opening for a video game adaptation at the box office, pulling down over $50m in domestic takings in its first weekend. The film has raised a domestic total of $94m to date and $290m worldwide, almost double its production budget.

The plot is set in the fictional Pokémon universe and follows Tim Goodman (Justice Smith), an insurance salesman who travels to the big city to investigate the mysterious death of his father, aided by a fluff journalist named Lucy (Kathryn Newton), her faithful Psyduck and a wise-cracking deerstalker-clad amnesiac Pikachu voiced by none other than Deadpool’s Ryan Reynolds. The group are taken down a winding road as they attempt to solve the bizarre crime as well as discovering possible clues as to Pikachu’s true identity.

The film wields an impressive background cast as well as an array of Pokémon which will be familiar to most fans of the original anime show and, of course, Nintendo’s incredible game series. The main cast are backed up by Bill Nighy (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Shawn of the Dead), Ken Watanbe (Batman Begins, Inception), Chris Geere (Modern Family), Suki Waterhouse (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), Omar Chaparro (Stuck) and British singer-songwriter Rita Ora. The movie features an uncountable number of nostalgic cameos from some of fans’ favourite animated characters from the good old days of the original first generation including Squirtle, Mr Mime, Lickitung, Jigglypuff and Magicarp among many others and of course, no Pokémon movie would be complete without appearances from Mewtwo and the mighty Charizard.

Detective Pikachu promises to be a true favourite for nostalgic kids of the 90’s, as well as Ryan Reynolds fans of any era. The PG-rated feel-good family comedy directed by Rob Letterman has received a score of 5.95 on Rotten Tomatoes and Cinemascore graded the film “A-“ after conducting a viewers’ poll.

Several series of merchandise are tied in with the movie including special content within Niantic Media’s game app Pokémon Go. Legendary Entertainment are set to release a graphic novel based on the film shortly and The Pokémon Company have released a new expansion of the well-known trading card game with cards featuring images from the film including a rare limited-edition card only available in Detective Pikachu’s opening weekend. Legendary announced in January that a sequel is already in development with Oren Uziel (The Cloverfield Paradox, Sonic the Hedgehog) signed on to pen the screenplay.