Pokémon: Detective Pikachu 2 happening, with a new team on the case

polygon.com:

2019’s Pokémon: Detective Pikachu was a big enough global hit for Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Entertainment, and The Pokémon Company to warrant a sequel, and yet fans of the pocket monsters entered 2023 with little to no update on what might be next for the budding live-action franchise. But now we finally have a clue: Deadline reports that Legendary is in negotiations with a new creative team to take on the theoretical Pokémon: Detective Pikachu 2.

According to the report, Jonathan Krisel, co-creator of the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia and the FX series Baskets, is likely to take over for original director Rob Letterman, while Chris Galletta (The Kings of Summer) is now on script duties. It’s unclear whether Ryan Reynolds would return to voice Pikachu — the ending of Detective Pikachu certainly raises questions of how exactly that would be possible — but Deadline suggests the Deadpool actor would have a role to play based on the direction of the film.

Earlier this year, in our hunt for answers as to the status of the dormant sequel, Legendary told Polygon that the movie was still in active development — just as it was in 2019. Even before Detective Pikachu premiered, Legendary hired writer Oren Uziel, who had scripted 22 Jump Street and a draft of Sonic the Hedgehog, to work on a sequel to the movie. Representatives for Uziel told Polygon that though he wrote an outline and screenplay for the movie, he was no longer involved with the film. Krisel and Galletta could be working off Uziel’s draft or starting fresh, but as of now, there’s no sense of timeline for the actual film, which at this point does not have a release date.

Mucking up the works is an imploded relationship between Legendary Entertainment and