Paddington 2 box office
#PADDINGTON 2 BOX OFFICE MOVIE#
King may not be Orson Welles, but he knows the movie biz.Īnother substantial chunk of the film’s charm comes courtesy of Grant. There’s also a heist, a prison break, and a delightfully random high-stakes cooking sequence, Masterchef-style.
The number of genres he manages to pack in and parody is astonishing: there’s a bicycle sequence that plays around with a classic Bond car chase, a steam train escape that horn-toots to Hitchcock, a mock underwater tragedy involving Sally Hawkins’ character that becomes a wry nod to The Shape of Water, and a disastrous attempt at window-cleaning by Paddington that might have been lifted straight out of a classic silent comedy. Like the fairground in which we first meet Buchanan, and which persists as an image throughout, King has built himself a playground in which to carousel the viewer through the history of the talkies. I maintain that Grant deserved an Oscar, but there’s no justice.Īny version of Bond’s beloved stories about the little bear (voiced in the film by Ben Whishaw) from Darkest Peru discovered on a train station platform by the good-natured Brown family was sure to be received with goodwill – they occupy that fur-fuzzily sentimental space we reserve for the stories that once persuaded us to sleep.īut the film stands on its own merit as a cinematic achievement indeed, King’s greatest innovation and addition to the original (Grant aside) is the homage he pays to cinema (it is this that makes its Rotten Tomatoes status fitting, and it’s ousting of Citizen Kane forgivable). The £8.3 million that it initially took at the British box office made it StudioCanal’s highest-ever grossing film in an opening weekend it subsequently received three Bafta nominations, including one for acting (Supporting, for Grant), a highly unusual achievement given the awards circuit’s ordinarily snooty attitude to both comedies and children’s films. While welcoming the “lovely” news, King called the ranking “eccentric” – but is he giving himself enough credit? After all, Hugh Grant, who plays the superbly self-skewering villain Phoenix Buchanan (King sent him the script on spec, along with a note: “The baddie is a washed-up, narcissistic actor and we thought of you”) has frequently declared – with uncharacteristic sincerity – that it’s a work of genius. Random and bizarre as the demotion of Orson Welles’ cinematic watershed is, it comes with a fur-trimmed silver lining: Paul King’s 2018 family adventure, inspired by Michael Bond’s beloved children’s books, is now the highest-rated film on the site. Last month, Citizen Kane lost its 100 per cent fresh rating on the review aggregator monolith Rotten Tomatoes, following an archival project’s rediscovery of a 1942 Chicago Tribune review which could find in it neither “distinction general entertainment value.”
#PADDINGTON 2 BOX OFFICE CRACK#
Put down the popcorn and crack open the marmalade: Paddington 2 has been officially recognised for the movie masterpiece it is. Razzle dazzle 'em: Hugh Grant's gives his greatest performance yet in Paddington 2 - Warner Bros