Legendary Pictures Detective Pikachu arrives in cinemas this week, and has managed to become that rarest of things – a video game movie that is actually good. That’s according to the majority of critics and fans who managed to get to an early screening, anyway.
The majority of praise aimed at the film seems to be leveled at its accessible, light hearted humour, and Ryan Reynold’s performance as the titular Pikachu detective. As I’m sure you’d expect from a film based on Pokemon, this is a family movie first and foremost.
With that in mind, anyone expecting to see Reynolds go full Deadpool and turn Pikachu into a wise-cracking detective with a love of dropping the “F bomb” will be disappointed – but that doesn’t mean an R-rated edit of Detective Pikachu isn’t possible, according to Reynolds himself.
In an interview with Kotaku, Reynolds revealed that there are probably enough risky outtakes from filming that a fan could, if they so desired, probably put together their own adult themed version of the much anticipated Pokemon movie. I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that, but the internet is the internet.
Reynolds said of the experience of filming for a motion capture character:
Motion capture is a unique experience in which you are alone and you throw a billion things up against the wall. It’s up to somebody else to sift through it and figure out what they think is going to be applicable and what they feel they want to use. I’d come out with 85 options for any one joke.
Legendary Pictures The actor revealed that there are a few, slightly riskier “pee and fart gags” that managed to make it into the movie that might have experienced “some pushback” from higher ups, but that every take he did as Pikachu “ran the gamut from Rated R to PG.”
Reynolds joked:
You could probably squeeze together a Rated-R cut if someone went looking for it in the edit, I’m sure. God forbid they would.
I would imagine that any footage of Reynolds as a potty-mouthed Pikachu will either have been destroyed by now, or will remain in a vault at Nintendo until the end of time. If the latter is the case, I will be planning a heist to obtain and disseminate that footage to the masses.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.