Pokemon Movie 22: ‘Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution’

The 21st Pokemon movie featuring Lugia and Zeraora premiered in Japan today. As usual, a teaser followed for next year’s film — and it seems it may feature Mewtwo from the first movie! As our good friend Dogasu at Dogasu’s Backpack has reported:

The teaser starts with a black screen. Text that says something along the lines of “The Legend is Back” (伝説が戻ってくる) appears in both English and Japanese. After that, some bubbles that’ll look very familiar to Movie 1 fans start floating up from the bottom of the screen.

As the bubbles continue to rise, we hear a voice that I’m 99.99999999% sure is Masachika Ichimura, the original voice of Mewtwo from Mewtwo Strikes Back (and that Johto TV special), recite the opening monologue from the first movie: “What is this place? Who am I?” (ここはどこだ？私は誰だ？). We then see a shot similar to the one below of Mewtwo opening its eyes, though I’m sad to say that the Mewtwo shown in the teaser for next year’s film is rendered in CG.

After this, the movie’s logo comes up: Pocket Monsters The Movie “Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution” (劇場版ポケットモンスター「ミュウツーの逆襲Evolution). The logo, at least now anyway, consists of the word “Evolution” written out in English slapped onto the bottom right-hand corner of the old Movie 1 logo from 1998.

Gamefreak has already stated Mewtwo will play a much larger role in the story for Let’s Go Pikachu! and Eevee, so it makes sense the movie will continue the Kanto hype train for marketing purposes.

At this point we don’t know anything about the film, but it’s highly unlikely it will be a straight-up remake of the first movie. Every new Pokemon film features at least one never-before-seen Pokemon, so they’ll have to integrate a new Pokemon into the story somehow (as with Marshadow in I Choose You or Zeraora in the latest film).