A few days ago, Toei announced their next big theatrical Kamen Rider release. Let’s take a look at the announcement and speculate a little about the film.
Toei Company announced on Twitter/X, this week, that their next theatrical release in the Kamen Rider series will feature both Kamen Rider Gotchard and its predecessor, Kamen Rider Geats. Set to launch in Japan on December 22nd, the official Toei Movie account posted the following:
Running the post though Google Translate and slightly cleaning it up a little give us:
“Kamen Rider THE WINTER MOVIE”
Gotchard & Geats”
💥 Scheduled for release on Friday, December 22nd, 2023 💥There is no Kamen Rider ⁉️
Shocking teaser visual released!“Geats chemy” in a fox costume is a big success in the competition 🦊 ?
Please look forward to future information 🦗
We were also given this poster, showing the Geats Kitsune Chemy and Hopper1 looking adorable. Taking a closer look at the Chemy Cards in the background of the picture, we can clearly see Hopper1 and Steamliner but, as well as that, there are new Chemy Cards based on Kamen Rider Geats, Buffa, Na-Go and Tycoon, not in the typical Legend Rider style but rather as Chemies in the same art style as is typical in Gotchard. I would assume these are going to be promo alt-art versions of their Legend Rider cards.
In addition to these six cards, we can see one other card extremely clearly and that is X Wizard. Zooming in further revealed what cards we can see the art for are BeetlX, Exceedfighter, Lixion, X Fortress and Xeggdrasil which are all six of the rank ten Chemies we currently know about. Their placement on a poster with so little revealing information implies that they will be a large focus of the movie, perhaps being used by the villain, used to create six extremely powerful Malgams or even being used by Hotaro for his movie form. All are equally possible. All we can say for sure is that time will tell. With a theatrical release date that’s only a couple of months away, we won’t have to wait long for more information.
In addition to the announcement, several promotional items were announced as well. Firstly, we have three promotional cards: one using the art of the Geats Chemy and Hopper1 from the poster. This is being given away with preorders to see the movie.
The next two show Hotaro and Ace, with their respective Chemies behind them, on the backgrounds used in the first posters for their series.
Additionally, there was a preorder item that I know a lot of Gotchard fans have been asking for since the announcement this year’s gimmick: a card binder! With art of Kamen Riders Geats and Gotchard on one side and the Geats Chemy and Hopper1 artwork from the poster on the other.
That’s all we have on the The Winter Movie, as of right now, and I’m pretty excited to see these two crossover. Be sure to keep your eyes on The Toku Source to see when these movie preorder items appear because I have no doubt in my mind that all of these will go extremely quickly, especially the binder.
What do you think? Are you hyped to see Gotchard and Geats crossover? Do you also hope they make a plush out of the Geats Chemy and Hopper1? Let us know in the comments below!
