Pokémon Card Game Gets Its First Movie—and It's Coming 2027
A Pokémon TCG movie, "Wild Card," is coming in 2027, animated by CloverWorks.
The Pokémon Company just announced what should have happened years ago: a feature film built entirely around the card game. Pokémon: Wild Card will release worldwide starting in 2027, marking the franchise's first animated movie to center the TCG rather than the games or show.
The teaser dropped at the Pokémon World Championships 2026 closing ceremony, and CloverWorks is handling animation production. Katsuhiko Kitada directs, with character design from Akemi Hayashi—a solid lineup that suggests the studio is treating this as a proper theatrical event, not a side project.
What the teaser actually shows remains light on detail, which is typical for this stage. The card game has spent decades as the quiet powerhouse of the Pokémon ecosystem—it's the revenue engine, the competitive scene, the reason kids still trade in schoolyards. Yet the anime and films have mostly ignored it as source material, treating it as flavor text rather than story. This film flips that.
The timing is sharp: the TCG is in a renaissance after years of supply chaos and scalper saturation. A major studio film could either capitalize on that momentum or, if it lands wrong, feel like corporate opportunism. CloverWorks' track record (they've handled Spy x Family and Chainsaw Man) suggests they understand how to balance spectacle with character work—both things a card game movie would need to avoid being a 90-minute commercial.
The real question is execution. A card game film has to make the mechanics feel like stakes, not just explain them. It needs to make a match matter the way a tournament does to the people who play. That's harder than it sounds. But if anyone in anime right now has the chops to pull it off, CloverWorks is in the conversation.
Wild Card arrives in 2027. The teaser is out. Now we wait to see if Pokémon actually made a card game movie that works.
Source: Anime Anime
