Legendary Officially Snags 'Pokemon' Movie Rights With A Story You Weren't Expecting

Pokemon Go continues to be all the rage in video gaming right now. The recently launched mobile version of the Nintendo video game franchise has become so popular in such a short amount of time that Comic-Con moved a panel for Pokemon Go from a smaller venue to the massive Hall H. And it sounds like sometime down the road Pokemon will be back at Comic-Con with a movie to show off with the movie rights officially being snagged by Legendary Pictures.

In addition, details on just what kind of story we can expect from the game have surfaced, and the movie will apparently go in a direction that likely no fan was expecting to hear. Find out more about the Pokemon movie after the jump.

Deadline reports Legendary has officially closed a deal for the movie rights to Pokemon after the studio emerged as a frontrunner about a week ago. Since Pokemon Go took off, many studios had renewed interest in the popular property, and whenever a movie actually rolls around it's bound to drum up plenty of interest. However, some fans may be a little perplexed about the direction of the movie when they hear what angle Legendary is looking to use.

According to the report, the Pokemon movie will use the Great Detective Pikachu video game from Japan as the basis for the franchise. Here's a trailer of the video game (in Japanese) to give you an idea of what that might be like:

For those of you who don't read or speak Japanese, here's the synopsis of the game from Wikipedia:

The game follows a peculiar talking Pikachu who, despite not being as powerful and nimble as other Pikachu of his kind, is rather intelligent and claims to be a great detective. One day, Pikachu encounters a boy named Tim Goodman, who is able to understand what he is saying. Thus, the two begin working together to solve various mysteries revolving around Pokémon in the city.

This seems like a weird direction for the Pokemon movie to take, but there have been plenty of movies about kids befriending odd creatures, so maybe it's not that crazy of an idea. The question is just how much of the standard Pokemon gameplay and elements will make it into the movie.

There are rumors swirling about Chronicle writer Max Landis being in the running to write the script, but that hasn't been confirmed. More than likely, we'll hear about this Pokemon movie coming together pretty quickly to capitalize on the popularity of Pokemon Go, perhaps starting production as early as 2017, so stay tuned to see how that goes.