The thought leaves such a bad taste in my mouth. I hope they never go this route.
Why? It's not like I'm saying it needs to go hard R with tits and blood everywhere. Just a light PG-13. Enough violence that it gets the rating and isn't seen as a kids' movie, but still easy enough on the violence that kids can still go see it. Like most superhero movies these days.
I want to see something like this in live action, and that would probably get a PG-13 rating.
Are kids movies suddenly deemed automatically "not good" or "inaccessible" for some reason? There are two big kids movies in theatres right now.
There should be more superhero movies aimed directly at kids imo. But that doesn't mean others can't enjoy them.
It's not about quality. It's about audience.
The kinds of 20-30 somethings who go out to see the latest summer blockbusters typically aren't going to see a movie targeted towards kids unless they have kids who they are taking.
On the other hand, kids, even those younger than 13, are highly likely to go see PG-13 blockbusters.
Look at this list of the highest grossing films worldwide.
Look at the ones that have crossed over $1 billion. There are 26 of them.
Four of them are kids' movies: Frozen, Minions, Toy Story 3, and Zootopia.
All of the rest are live action PG-13 blockbusters.
As we've seen with Pokemon Go, there's a huge number of Millennials who still have a ton of nostalgia for Pokemon. It's still a strong brand beyond kids if packaged correctly. And I don't think a movie about a talking Pikachu solving crimes is the correct packaging to take advantage of that demographic. I think they're wasting a huge opportunity here by making a movie that will really only appeal to kids and current hardcore Pokemon fans when they could instead make a movie that also captures millions of casual Pokemon fans.