Paul King’s first film took £55,000. His second – an adaptation of Michael Bond’s friendly bear books – has made £170m and counting. How did the former director of Mighty Boosh and Garth Marenghi manage it?
“The world does not,” says Paul King, “always greet the announcement of a CGI reboot with great enthusiasm.” For eight years, the prospect of a hybrid live-action/computer generated Paddington film was met with fretting and trepidation. Purists were concerned about the insertion of fart jokes into Michael Bond’s prose. Children of the 1970s about trampling over the memory of the Michael Hordern-narrated TV series.
Production was, publicly at least, a little troubled. Harry Potter honcho David Heyman first optioned the property in 2007, when Warner Bros were on board. After they dropped it, French outfit StudioCanal took over, and planning proper didn’t begin until 2013. Then, last summer, the departure of Colin Firth, whose sonorous tones were felt an ill-fit for the youthful bear. Then the “creepy Paddington” meme, which recast the faintly sinister shot of the bear from the first poster as, variously, a ghost, a zombie and an axe-murderer. Then the British Board of Film Classification’s decision to award it a PG certificate for “mild sex references and mild bad language”, mostly involving a scene in which Hugh Bonneville is propositioned while cross-dressing as a cleaner called Myfanwy.
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