Miyamoto says he’s been wanting to grow the Pikmin IP, not ruling out a movie

According to Pikmin creator Shigeru Miyamoto, he’s been wanting to grow the franchise over the past few years. 

Pikmin has been around since the GameCube days, but it hasn’t seen the same amount of popularity as some of his other creations such as Mario and Zelda. However, during the Nintendo Switch era, it’s been steadily gaining traction – especially with the launch of Pikmin 4.

Miyamoto told IGN in a recent interview:

“I spent a lot of time the past five, six years really wanting to grow Pikmin. Obviously a lot of that is focused around Pikmin Bloom and there was also new Pikmin titles that released. But I wanted to see if there’s other ways that we can have people engage and get to know Pikmin that’s outside of the population that plays video games, for example.”

Miyamoto was also specifically asked if Pikmin could be expanded further with things like more areas at Super Nintendo World, longer shows, or even a movie. He said in response:

“Obviously I can’t say yes or no here. But I really see Nintendo as sort of like a talent agency and we have within our roster a lot of talented characters. So we create a game with a certain gameplay concept, gameplay experience, and then we look at the roster and see who would best fit this gameplay concept or experience.

So looking at things from that perspective, I think Pikmin has a lot of potential to be used in many different occasions. When you’re looking at small kids, they have a certain appeal for things that are cute and when they grow older, maybe in their twenties, they start to lose appeal for that. But I think Pikmin has this unique ability to have appeal across a broad range in that it’s still appealing for both younger audiences and older audiences and in Japan. And so I’m hoping that we can expand that globally. So whether it’s some kind of a movie or show, things like that would be really fun.”

We also heard from Miyamoto today about why Nintendo decided to change Donkey Kong’s design. In case you missed it, check out his comments here.