So, Pokemon Go came out like five minutes ago, and Hollywood is already snapping its jaws at the movie rights. It’s hard to blame them, the game has been a phenomenal success – Nintendo, which you may have heard of as it was already one of the biggest corporations on the planet, has seen its shares skyrocket by ten percent – and it was so unprecedented.

According to Superdata Research, the game generated over $14 million in the first four days after its launch, but who was talking about Pokemon last week?

Now it’s the reason people are going to get hit by a lot of cars when they’re out and about looking for Pikachu (or whoever). Way back before its second coming, when it was all the rage with its original fanbase, a Film was considered but nothing came to fruition.

Now, with all the renewed interest, Chinese film investment firm Legendary Pictures is looking into it again. Legendary is the company behind Warcraft and Pacific Rim, focusing on international markets for huge chunks of their profits, meaning the Asian influence of Pokemon is right up their alley. I don’t know the politics of it, but Pokemon is about as Japanese as pop culture gets, so I hope China and Japan are friends.

The name Max Landis has been bandied around as screenwriter. Oh, great, yeah, get him onboard. Because Victor Frankenstein and American Ultra were so amazing. And it’s not like he’s getting much work, he’s only selling a screenplay a week. Seriously, there’s no way he’d have had a chance in Hell of ever getting anywhere in showbiz if his father wasn’t one of the most influential directors of all time. But hey-ho, that’s the industry.

I have to say, I’m not quite sure what a Pokemon Go movie will entail. The only thing it adds to the pre-existing Pokemon universe is the augmented reality, and although they may be cooking up something insane to implement this idea into a cinema, films need stories, if I’m not mistaken, not just a cool way to blend Japanese fiction with your reality.

Maybe Hollywood is just using the Pokemon Go brand to hide the shame of losing the film rights a few years ago and only just now realising the popularity of it, and making out like, “Oh, yeah, we weren’t going to do a Pokemon movie until the perfect source material came along,” and then slyly throw out the source material and go back to the original development from way back when.

Whatever the plan, a Pokemon movie is on its way, which will either be great or terrible. Probably terrible. If Landis is involved, definitely terrible.