Bad title puns aside, in a truly bizarre twist, Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) is set to play the titular character in Detective Pikachu, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
That is about all the facts that anyone knows right now; Legendary Pictures has kept most of the details in the dark. But that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of things to say.
This is yet another entry in a frankly baffling career for Reynolds. Despite being in a bevy of films from from 2000-2015, he was mostly known as “the cute guy” from whatever movie you happened to see him in.
It wasn’t until 2016 that he became a household name in his own right with Deadpool, in which he played the meta-textual titular character – for the second time. He previously played the same character – sort of – in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
And yet, Reynolds as Detective Pikachu feels like the strangest part yet. He is voice acting and motion capturing a talking Pokemon based on a video game that was based on a massive children’s media franchise that was based on yet another video game. And until today’s announcement, the internet’s main choice to play Pikachu was Danny DeVito.
If nothing else, it will be fascinating to see how this production, and performance, plays out.
