Hugh Grant and Paul King address the one bad review that tainted “Paddington 2”'s perfect score

"I wrote it!" jokes Grant. "Why did I do that?!"

For a brief time in 2018, moviegoers around the world enjoyed a rare moment of peace when we all came together to celebrate the fact that Paddington 2 was a perfect movie, at least according to its 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Then, one film critic swept in and mucked it all up.

Director Paul King and the movie's star Hugh Grant discuss that single negative review in EW's latest installment of our Around the Table video series, featuring the cast of Wonka, in which King and Grant reunite. They broach the subject when Timothée Chalamet, who plays the titular Willy Wonka, calls Paddington 2 "a truly nearly perfect film."

"What was the problem?" King jokes in response. "You were very clear with 'nearly.'"

"The problem is the 1 percent standard deviation that I think exists on Rotten Tomatoes," the actor replied.

Surrounded by Grant, Chalamet, and their fellow Wonka stars Keegan-Michael Key and Calah Lane, King recalls how Paddington 2 enjoyed a 100 percent score on the review aggregation site "for a while." Then, in 2021, a review from Film Authority knocked its score down to 99 percent. "Somebody was so angry that they wanted to bring it down," the filmmaker says. "It's a great human impulse to go, 'Not you!'"

"I wrote it," Grant jokes. "Why did I do that?!"

The negative review arrived at a point when Citizen Kane, which had also had a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, lost its 100 percent "fresh" rating thanks to an unearthed 80-year-old review. The Paddington 2 critic Eddie Harrison called the film "contrived and ridiculous" and its titular character "over-confident, snide, and sullen" and "a sinister, malevolent imposter who should be shot into space, or nuked from space at the first opportunity."

"It's a strange metric, because it's people who are broadly positive," King says of Rotten Tomatoes. Of Paddington 2 matching Citizen Kane's score, he asks, "Do you think Orson Welles is sad? Just going, 'I thought I did good, and then Paddington.'"

Wonka opens in theaters this Friday. Watch the full video of EW's Around the Table below.

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