Summary

• Paddington 2 director Paul King reacts to the movie losing its 100% Rotten Tomatoes score due to a single negative review.
• The cast of Wonka joked about Paddington 2's loss, with Timothée Chalamet calling it "nearly perfect" and Hugh Grant jokingly claiming to have written the negative review.
• The loss of a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes for both Paddington 2 and Citizen Kane shows that even highly acclaimed films will always have detractors.

Paddington 2 director Paul King reacts to the movie losing its 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. A sequel to 2014's Paddington, the 2017 film continued following the heartwarming adventures of the titular marmalade-loving bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw) with an all-star British cast that included Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi, and Hugh Grant in live-action roles. The sequel received massive critical acclaim and became one of the rare films alongside Orson Welles' Citizen Kane to achieve and lose a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes due to a single negative review.

King, who also directed Wonka, recently reacted to Paddington 2 losing its 100% Rotten Tomatoes score in a new "Around the Table" interview with Entertainment Weekly. The Wonka cast, which includes Timothée Chalamet and Hugh Grant, joked about Paddington 2 losing its 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, starting with the former calling it "a truly nearly perfect film," causing King to address the one bad review that tainted its perfect score. Read their full exchange below:

Chalamet: [Paddington 2 is] a truly nearly perfect film.

King: What was the problem? You were very clear with "nearly."

Chalamet: The problem is the 1 percent standard deviation that I think exists on Rotten Tomatoes.

King: Somebody was so angry that they wanted to bring it down. It's a great human impulse to go, "Not you!"

Grant: I wrote it. Why did I do that?!

King: It's a strange metric, because it's people who are broadly positive. Do you think Orson Welles is sad? Just going, "I thought I did good, and then Paddington."

How Paddington 2 & Citizen Kane Lost Their 100% Rotten Tomatoes Scores

Citizen Kane, which is widely regarded as the greatest film ever made, maintained a perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for many years. That was until an 80-year-old negative review from the Chicago Tribune was unearthed in 2021 and knocked down its rating to 99%. As a result, Paddington 2 sured Citizen Kane as one of the few films with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Not long after that, in 2021, a negative Paddington 2 review from Film Authority surfaced online and knocked its score down to 99%.

The negative Paddington 2 review was rather outrageous, with the critic calling the sequel "contrived and ridiculous" and the titular character "over-confident, snide, and sullen," adding that the lovable bear is "a sinister, malevolent imposter who should be shot into space, or nuked from space at the first opportunity." More negative reviews have been published since, though the sequel still maintains a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Paddington 2 and Citizen Kane losing their perfect scores demonstrates that no matter the movie, there will always be some detractors.

Paddington 2 is streaming on Hulu and Max.

Source: EW