Detective Pikachu Might Exist In The Home Alone Universe

The Detective Pikachu movie is bursting with Easter eggs and callbacks to the Pokemon universe, and has a huge variety of realistic-looking CGI Pokemon as well. Detective Pikachu isn't just hyper-aware of its Pokemon source material and full of jokes for fans--it also has plenty of references to pop culture mixed in throughout.

One big and easy to miss Easter egg pops up early in the movie, when protagonist Tim Goodman visits the apartment of his father, Detective Harry Goodman, after his death. The place is in the state Harry left it, and Tim even finds the TV still on. He rolls his eyes and makes a comment about his dad's love for old detective movies, before moving on to find the Pokemon-themed bedroom his dad set up for him when he was a kid.

The movie comes off as some random black-and-white film noir offering, but it's actually not. What's playing on Harry's TV is not a real movie at all--it's a clip from the beloved 1990 John Hughes family comedy, Home Alone.

In that movie, when young Kevin McCallister finds himself alone in his house, he eats ridiculous ice cream sundaes of his own devising and puts on an R-rated black-and-white movie. The movie is "Angels With Filthy Souls," the same thing Tim finds on the TV at Harry's.

The thing is, "Angels With Filthy Souls" is not a real movie. It's just one scene and was created specifically for Home Alone. It also gave birth to the iconic line, "Keep the change, ya filthy animal." Director Rob Letterman told FreshFiction.tv's Courtney Howard the movie's use on Harry's TV was originally a placeholder, but the filmmakers never found anything that could beat it--so eventually, they looked into licensing the fake film instead of trying to get a real one, and it made it into the Detective Pikachu final cut.

Still, the inclusion of "Angels With Filthy Souls" means one of two things are true: First, Harry's TV could be playing Home Alone (and, possibly, Harry is a fan of that movie, like literally every human), which means Home Alone is a movie in the universe of Pokemon. Or second, in the Pokemon world, "Angels With Filthy Souls" is a real movie, just like in Home Alone--which means that Tim Goodman and Pikachu share a universe with Kevin McCallister and the Wet Bandits.