Well, it's fair to say that none of us saw this coming! It's been confirmed that Paddington 2 - which was released in North America this month and in the UK in November - is now the best-reviewed movie of all-time with 167 "Fresh" reviews and not a single Rotten one. It was a couple of months ago that Lady Bird topped Toy Story 2 to take that honour but one bad verdict ultimately pushed it down to 99%.
Paddington 2 will more than likely cross the $200 million mark at the worldwide box office by the time all is said and done, a pretty solid result for a movie which wasn't particularly expensive to produce!
Director Paul King is understandably surprised by the news but grateful for the positive response.
"It’s incredibly gratifying. It’s such a strange process making these films which are preposterously labor-intensive. Normally you feel a film is coming into shape fairly quickly, but when it’s semi-animated so much of it evolves over the following year and you spend so many dozens of hours in darkened rooms looking at incredibly small details. You get incredibly meticulous and controll-y over every last frame. But there’s a danger you entirely lose your mind — and there’s an extraordinary moment when your head comes above water and the first response is from critics.
"Younger kids are probably not reading film reviews or on Twitter. Hopefully the parents are reading reviews to children. I dream of households across America going, ‘Hey, son, listen to this metric. This is arguably the most appreciated film in history.'” More seriously, he says, “I hope it will be one of those miracle films and people spread the word. Fingers crossed it’ll be the little train that could. The good thing is that it’s not one of these $200 million behemoths that needs to take in $1 billion."
Superhero movies fared well with critics in 2017 (well, other than Justice League) but none of them came close to results like this. Do you think any of 2018's releases will beat Paddington 2? Black Panther seems like it could stand a chance but we'll have to wait and see. Share your thoughts below.
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