It was recently announced that Netflix will be producing a live-action Pokemon series. The series is currently set to be headed up by Lucifer’s producer, Joe Henderson, who will write and executive produce the live-action adaptation of one of the most popular video games of all time. After the success of Detective Pikachu in 2019, it’s no wonder that Netflix is jumping all over a live-action Pokemon series, although it has been a pretty long time coming. If you want to watch a majority of the previous Pokemon anime seasons, Netflix is your best best, since it has a few movies, as well as a couple seasons of the anime such as Journeys and Sun & Moon Ultra Legends. While we don’t know much about the series, we can definitely start making some predictions. So, what exactly do we want to see come from the live-action Netflix Pokemon series?
Animation
It seems kind of strange to have animation be one of the main talking points of a live-action series, but it is definitely something to take into consideration. While 2019’s Detective Pikachu was marketed as a live-action Pokemon movie – and it was live-action – the Pokemon themselves are impossible to show without some form of animation, which leads me to my main point here. This upcoming Netflix Pokemon series needs to have Detective Pikachu level animation for all of the Pokemon that are involved in the series. There’s just absolutely no way that I think they’ll be able to get away with anything less than that, simply due to the standards that Detective Pikachu set a few years ago. I’m sure that they know this, and will probably have a massive budget for this series, due to the fact that the animation team needs to be amazing (and should be paid fairly for their work), so I’m sure the budget is definitely going to be high.
Lots of Pokemon
Probably one of the most obvious points is that there needs to be a lot of Pokemon involved in this Netflix Pokemon series. However, while this may seem fairly obvious, I do still think that there is the potential for Netflix to attempt to go a different route with the series and completely avoid using any Pokemon altogether. This would definitely be the worst move that Netflix could make, so I don’t really think that they would actually end up doing it, but you never know. We’ve seen bigger mistakes made by bigger companies that made absolutely no sense at all. If the series goes how a Pokemon series should, then we can probably expect to see a lot of Pokemon throughout the Netflix series.
New Characters
Yes, Ash Ketchum is by far probably the most recognizable Pokemon character (and probably one of the most recognizable characters in history) of all time, but I do think that it’s probably time for someone else to step up and take the lead for the Netflix Pokemon series. I’m not saying that I have any real problems with Ash, but he’s been in the spotlight for more than enough time, and we’ve seen what having other main characters can do for Pokemon. Take a look at Detective Pikachu again, this was a new movie that saw an entirely new cast with no mention of Ash whatsoever. The movie outperformed anyone’s expectations at the box office, and is widely regarded as one of the best live-action video game movies of all time. I’m not saying that the series needs to completely get rid of Ash, I think introducing him with a small cameo would be great, but I think that the main role should be a new character.
Plot
We really don’t know anything about the Netflix Pokemon series yet, but that won’t stop me from thinking about what the series could potentially revolve around. I think it would be cool to see a live-action series based on one of the actual Pokemon games; getting to see gym battles and the legendary Pokemon like Kyogre and Rayquaza would be really cool to see in live-action. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll be left guessing until we get more information about the series, which doesn’t seem like it will be anytime soon.
What do you think about Netflix making its way into video game territory? We’ve already seen them hit massive success with other video game series like The Witcher, Castlevania, and Resident Evil, and they’ve even come to announce that they will be dipping their toes into the game development area sometime soon. I guess you could say it looks like Netflix is really trying to…..catch ’em all.
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