Paddington (Movie)

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    Britain’s Friendliest Bear to Hit the Stage in ‘Paddington: The Musical’

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    The star of a long-running book series and two films will hit the stage in a show currently being developed in Britain, producers said.Paddington, the well-traveled bear known for his floppy red hat and love for orange marmalade sandwiches, is taking on yet another venture in 2025: the theater.A stage musical about the friendly bear is in development and is set to open in Britain in 2025, the show’s producers announced on Tuesday. It will be adapted from the book series that made him famous, as well as the two live-action films, “Paddington” and “Paddington 2.”The working title is “Paddington: The Musical,” and it “is currently undergoing a period of development and workshops,” according to a news release.Paddington was first introduced in a book series by Michael Bond that follows the good-natured bear who emigrates from Peru to England and is taken in by the Brown family. Paddington is sweet, curious and prone to mishaps.The first book in the series, “A Bear Called Paddington,” was published in October 1958. More than 35 million copies of Paddington books have been sold worldwide.The live-action feature films, with Ben Whishaw as the voice of Paddington, premiered in Britain in 2014 and 2017. The first film depicts Paddington’s arrival in London and the early stages of his relationship with the Brown family. In the second film, Paddington attempts to get his Aunt Lucy a gift and ends up in prison, where, eventually, there is music, cake and dancing.A third film, “Paddington in Peru,” is set to be released in Britain on Nov. 8, 2024. Its U.S. release date is Jan. 17, 2025.The stage show’s music and lyrics will be written by Tom Fletcher, a founding member of the popular British band McFly and a well-known children’s author. The musical’s book will be by Jessica Swale, whose play “Nell Gwynn” won an Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2016.The musical’s director will be Luke Sheppard, who has worked on “Just for One Day,” “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Rent.”The musical is being produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, Studiocanal and Eliza Lumley Productions on behalf of Universal Music UK. The producers did not provide details on the plot and said the cast would be announced later.“The magic of Paddington is that, through his wide-eyed innocence, he sees the very best in humanity,” Ms. Friedman and Ms. Lumley said in a joint statement, “reminding us that love and kindness can triumph if we open our hearts and minds to one another.” More

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      The Artist Who Photoshops Paddington Into Everything

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      For nearly 1,000 straight days, Jason Chou has inserted Paddington, the anthropomorphized bear, into absurd situations. He has no plans to stop.Paddington is the busiest bear in Hollywood.While fans wait another year for the third installment of his film franchise, Paddington has found time for roles opposite Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro. He celebrated a goal with Ted Lasso, slipped on a spacesuit for “Interstellar” and appeared onstage with David Byrne. He devoured spicy wings on “Hot Ones,” cracked open a children’s book with LeVar Burton on “Reading Rainbow” and recently joined Thanksgiving feasts with characters from “Peanuts,” “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons.”It is a daunting schedule made possible by the hard work and creativity of Jason Chou, a self-described Paddington enthusiast, who has spent nearly three years harnessing the magic of Photoshop to teleport the marmalade-loving, escapade-seeking, hard-staring bear into scenes from popular films and television shows.“At this point, I feel like some people anticipate it every day,” said Mr. Chou, 27, a student at Gnomon, a visual effects school in Los Angeles, “and it’s hard to let them down.”Mr. Chou, who has created a Paddington-related post every day since March 2021, is nearing a milestone: his 1,000th post, which, barring a Paddington-esque misadventure, will go live on Sunday. (The posts often appear after midnight on the East Coast.) Mr. Chou’s work lives on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he has more than 340,000 followers under his handle, @jaythechou, and where he has pledged to “Photoshop Paddington into a movie, game, or TV show until I forget.”Thanks to the work of Mr. Chou, Paddington has appeared in “Scream,” “28 Days Later,” “Halloween” and “Home Alone.”Jason ChouThe milestone is, if nothing else, one of the internet’s more unusual feats of endurance. (He has yet to forget.) In a telephone interview, Mr. Chou described his creative process.“I basically just try to fit him into a scene,” he said.Few people have Mr. Chou’s persistence, but Geoffrey Palmer, another internet artist, is one of them. Inspired by Mr. Chou’s work, Mr. Palmer has, for the past couple of years, spent a few minutes each weekday morning photoshopping Paddington into various tableaus from Magic: The Gathering, the fantasy card game.Yes, Mr. Chou has spawned a Paddington Photoshop coaching tree.“Anyone who loves Paddington is probably a good person,” Mr. Chou said.Mr. Palmer, 38, who makes television commercials for a mattress company, described Paddington as “a purely good thing that exists,” which helps explain why any of this works.As a beloved character from children’s books, animated television shows and now a film franchise — “Paddington in Peru,” the third film of the series, will be released in the United States in January 2025 — Paddington is known for his innate curiosity, which often lands him in sticky situations.Paddington hasn’t been seen on the big screen since 2017, but Mr. Chou, a visual effects student in Los Angeles, has kept the beloved character on the move.Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times“He sort of steps through all these different scenes in wonderment,” said Mr. Palmer, who lives in Prior Lake, Minn. “So it feels natural that Paddington would suddenly be in ‘The Godfather’ or in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. I think it’s the whimsy of it that people appreciate and connect with so much.”Mr. Chou has always sought to stay true to Paddington’s principles.“Even in some of the action scenes, I kind of find myself saying: ‘Oh, Paddington! Don’t do this!’” he said. “I’m scared that one of these days I’m going to accidentally turn Paddington into a bad guy or something.”Mr. Chou’s winding path to Paddington traces back to a childhood love of the original “Star Wars” trilogy. His mother fed his obsession by presenting him with a boxed set of the movies, which included a DVD devoted to special effects.“I watched that all day,” Mr. Chou said.Soon enough, Mr. Chou was making his own animations with clay, and he continued to pursue his artistic interests in high school and at the University of California, Irvine, where he studied film and video production. It was while Mr. Chou was a student there that the seeds of his Paddington opus were sown.Inspired by Mr. Chou, Geoffrey Palmer began inserting Paddington into images from the Magic: The Gathering universe. His version of Progenitus came after a request from Mr. Chou.Geoffrey PalmerHe recalled being stuck on a freeway in Southern California one winter afternoon in 2018. He was feeling anxious about school and about finding a job, and the traffic — well, the traffic was brutal.“I thought: You know what? I’ll just go watch a movie,” he said.Mr. Chou pulled off the freeway and found a cinema, which happened to be showing “Paddington 2.” The woman at the concessions stand told him that he would love it. Mr. Chou had no idea that Paddington’s escapades would affect him so profoundly.The consistency of Paddington’s character resonated with him. Throughout the film, Paddington remains his bighearted, accident-prone self even as those around him change — and change for the better, often because of their interactions with him. Consider the unlikely friendships he makes in a prison full of hardened criminals. (Spoiler: Paddington goes to prison.)“But he just keeps doing his thing,” Mr. Chou said. “And no matter how many obstacles you throw at him, the power of being polite and being kind gets him through everything. I just felt so happy at the end.”A few years later, with free time during the pandemic, Mr. Chou was a regular visitor to Reddit. Social media challenges were in vogue, and Mr. Chou acknowledged that he “needed something to do.” So he photoshopped a giant Paddington into a scene from “Godzilla vs. Kong” and posted it to a film-related subreddit, pledging to do something similar every day.“Paddington 2” was critically acclaimed and grossed more than $200 million worldwide. The third installment of the film franchise, “Paddington in Peru,” will be released in the United States in January 2025.Getty Images“It was sort of light and fun content, to cheer people up,” Mr. Chou said. “And it kept growing.”The subreddit quickly turned into a forum for “film nerds to just kind of geek out about a photoshopped bear in their favorite movies,” said Jarick Simbol, one of Mr. Chou’s avid followers.Mr. Simbol, 28, used the platform Letterboxd to catalog the films and television shows that Mr. Chou used in his ever-expanding Paddington portfolio, which gained an even broader audience once Mr. Chou made the move to Twitter about six months into the experiment.Mr. Simbol tracked Mr. Chou’s posts for 665 straight days, before life got in the way.“I got a new job, ended up having to work long hours and just couldn’t keep up,” said Mr. Simbol, who lives in Long Beach, Calif., where he works in the video game and e-sports industry. “I mean, I was just writing things down. He’s actually doing the work. I think it’s genuinely impressive.”Since the start, Mr. Chou has prioritized consistency.“I do one a day,” said Mr. Chou, who hopes to work in the film industry. “And it doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t get a lot of views, because that might affect the way I do things.”Mr. Chou has had to get creative to come up with new images every day for nearly three years. His dedication has attracted a large following on social media.Elizabeth Lippman for The New York TimesAnd while he dabbled in Patreon, the monetization service for artists, he quickly abandoned that effort. He didn’t get into the Paddington Photoshop business for the money — or for fame, though he did sound bummed that Paddington doesn’t follow him on X.“There must be a reason,” Mr. Chou said.Neither Paddington nor his representatives at StudioCanal, the French production house that oversees the “Paddington” franchise, responded to requests for comment.At this august stage of the series, Mr. Chou is facing challenges. Atop the list: He initially wanted to avoid using the same television show or film more than once, but that pool becomes shallower by the day.“I kind of boxed myself in,” Mr. Chou said.So he has made exceptions, while expanding his oeuvre to include video games and the occasional album cover. For example, there was a recent homage to Taylor Swift: “1989 (Paddington’s Version).”“In terms of an end goal, I don’t think there is one,” Mr. Chou said. “I would just feel bad if I stopped.” More

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      Honey, I Blew Up the Family Film

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      What ever happened to the live-action adventures and G-rated titles adults and children could watch together in the theater?My son’s first movie was “La La Land,” which he watched strapped to my chest during a baby-friendly matinee in Brooklyn. He was 7 months old then, hungry and appropriately fussy, which means that I spent most of the movie standing at the back of the theater — nursing, jiggling, shushing — and that neither of us has seen “La La Land” all the way through. But you can’t say I didn’t start him early.For me, moviegoing is a pleasure learned in the 1980s from my own mother. She mostly took me to movies that she wanted to see — “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Heat and Dust.” That decade brought plenty of kid-centered blockbusters too: “E.T.,” “The Goonies,” “The Princess Bride.” Moviegoing is a habit I’ve hoped to instill in my own children. A theatrical experience insists that we all watch the same thing at the same time. At home, on movie night, I’m as likely to be dealing with the dishes or scrolling on my phone. In a theater, we share the experience. Also: popcorn.But as we’re not superhero fans (and unlike my mother, I balk at taking school-age kids to R-rated films), our moviegoing has been sporadic. Most months, there’s nothing we want to see in theaters. We’re not alone.In the spring, Matt Singer, the editor and critic at ScreenCrush.com, posted on Twitter, “As a parent of little kids it would be great if there was literally *any* movie in theaters right now I could take them to.” His choices at the time were “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” a PG-13 sequel with a body count that would have terrified his 5-year-old, or “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” which had already been running for four months, mostly because exhibitors keen to attract a family audience had no other options.G-rated titles have largely disappeared. Even the Pixar film “Elemental” was rated PG.Disney/PixarNow, in August, there are a few more films in wide release. My kids, 7 and 10, recently saw “Elemental,” Pixar and Disney’s latest animated collab, with my mom. (Her tastes have mellowed.) Theaters are still showing the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” and the computer-animated “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” seems to have come and gone more quickly, though it remains available on demand.David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, estimates that family films will earn about $4.9 billion this year, commensurate, or nearly, with recent prepandemic totals. But there are only 12 major theatrical releases currently scheduled for the whole of 2023, about half as many as in 2019. And the lineup, which includes the current “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and the forthcoming “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie” and “Trolls Band Together,” is not particularly inspiring.“The companies aren’t in it for charity,” Gross said. “They’re going make movies that have an advantage.”Of these 12, a third could reasonably be called original: “Elemental,” “Ruby Gillman” and the forthcoming “Wish,” with Ariana DeBose voicing Disney’s latest animated heroine, and “Migration,” about a family of ducks written improbably by Mike White (“White Lotus”). The others all depend on pre-existing intellectual property — cartoons, video games, books. Many of these movies, though by no means all, have a lowest-common-denominator feel, testifying to conservatism among studios and a deficit of imagination and ambition.So what happened to the great family movie?Well, a lot of things. “It’s cultural, it’s technological, it’s financial, it’s sociological,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Comscore, a media analytics company.“Wish,” from Disney,” is one of the few original films aimed at children this year.Walt Disney Animation StudiosWhile certain stressors on the family film predate 2020, the pandemic obviously compounded the current predicament: It disrupted the supply chain, pushed many families out of the moviegoing groove and diverted quality releases to streaming services. Of the major genres, the family film has been the slowest to rebound theatrically, which has made studios reluctant to take chances on a wide release for riskier material.“Right now, the question is what does it take to get any movie in the theater that isn’t giant branded I.P.,” said Nina Jacobson, a producer and a past president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, a studio in the Walt Disney Company. The theatrical marketplace, she suggested, has largely stopped taking those chances, creating a closed loop. “If you don’t give people anything to go to see other than Marvel movies, then you can say only Marvel movies work,” Jacobson said.But family films have been undergoing a shift that predates both 2020 and Marvel dominance. The G rating, a stalwart of the films of my childhood, has nearly disappeared, a corollary to the reluctance of producers of family films to admit that they’re meant for families.“My entire career, there has been a shortage of movies that the youngest kids can see in the theater,” said Betsy Bozdech, an editorial director at Commonsense Media, a site that rates and reviews media aimed at children. “The G rating basically doesn’t exist anymore.” This year, we will probably see no full-length G-rated movies. (Even the “Paw Patrol” sequel is PG.) Only a decade ago, there were 18. In 2003? More than 30.The dearth of family films is also a function of the much chronicled demise of midbudget movies — including ones that Jacobson oversaw, like “Freaky Friday” and “The Princess Diaries.” Midbudget movies don’t have to work as hard to earn back their investment and they can afford to appeal to a narrower tranche of the moviegoing public, meaning the releases can be more particular in tone and style.Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a related move away from live-action theatrical family films and toward animation. What live action there is, as in the case of Disney’s high-grossing remakes, often relies on so many computer-generated effects that it doesn’t seem live at all. (Compare the recent, dutiful live action “Beauty and the Beast,” with 1989’s delightful “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” or 1991’s delirious “Hook.”) These movies can still delight and make meaning, as with the ecstatic kid reactions to Halle Bailey’s Little Mermaid. But there’s particular wonder and possibility in seeing characters who look like you or behave like you onscreen, in real-world or real-world adjacent situations.“To see a young lead in a movie who you identify with, to see a story with you in mind, to see that you matter in that storytelling as a young person, those are movies that you hold onto,” Jacobson said.No one has to go to the movies anymore. Wait a month or two or six and you can see these same films from the comfort of your couch. And quality may not even matter absolutely. Certainly there are days — rainy or too hot — when the temptation of a climate-controlled seat and Raisinets suffices, no matter the movie on offer.But if we want movie theaters to survive, that will mean building the moviegoing habit in children, which means giving them an experience, beyond the candy counter, that keeps them coming back. A third “Trolls” movie may not offer that. Instead studios will need to get comfortable with some risk and some trust, making movies for children that don’t talk down to them.“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a Netflix movie, shows that auteurs are still interested in making films for young viewers.Netflix, via Associated Press“Kids are more sophisticated and have the emotional capacity to be able to absorb things that traditional Hollywood doesn’t think they can absorb,” said Todd Lieberman, a producer whose coming-of-age World War II tale, “White Bird: A Wonder Story,” will be released later this year.We can’t expect an “E.T.” every year, or even movies commensurate with the gems I recall from my youth: Agnieszka Holland’s “The Secret Garden,” Alfonso Cuarón’s “A Little Princess,” John Sayles’s “The Secret of Roan Inish.” But we should expect better. And better remains possible.Prestige directors are still interested in family movies — see “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” and planned Narnia movies. And have you seen the “Paddington” movies? Perfection. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine a future in which there are more and finer children’s movies in theaters, ones that send you back out into the light blinking and amazed. As an adult moviegoer, I often feel spoiled for choice. If we want children to return as adults, we should spoil them, too.“Give people great original family content and they will show up,” Jacobson said. “But it’s on us to give it to them.” More