Production

Development

The film was officially announced in July 2016[13] although Legendary Pictures were reported to
be in talks as early as April of that year.[14] The reason for adapting Detective Pikachu came from
The Pokémon Company and Letterman's desire to make a movie that focused on another
character besides Ash Ketchum, the protagonist of the Pokémon animated TV series. On the
premise, Letterman stated, "The Pokémon Company, they've already made many, many movies
of Ash, and they came to Legendary with this idea of using a new character. So when I came
onboard, I was pitched this character of Detective Pikachu, and I fell in love with the story
behind it."[15] The idea of talking Pokémon originated from an early concept for the 1990s TV
series, but was scrapped when the original game developer Game Freak was unsatisfied with the
concept, before the idea was revived for the 2016 Detective Pikachu spin-off game.[16] Before
filming began, Letterman said that they "spent a year designing all the characters ahead of
shooting so that we could get it all right."[17]

On August 16, 2016, Nicole Perlman and Alex Hirsch were in negotiations with Legendary to
write the screenplay.[18] Later revisions were provided by Eric Pearson, Thomas McCarthy,
Derek Connolly, Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit and director Rob Letterman.[19] On November 30,
2016, Legendary hired Rob Letterman to direct the film, which the studio had fast-tracked for
production to start in 2017.[20]