There’s something about really great family movies that critics can all get behind.
Paddington 2, the sequel to the 2015 movie about the fictional beloved British bear, has beaten out Toy Story 2 as the best-reviewed film of all time on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie, which premiered in the US last weekend, earned 165 positive reviews and counting without receiving a single negative review. Toy Story 2 previously held the record with 163 straight “Fresh” reviews and remarkably, no “Rotten” reviews, as the site calls them, after nearly 20 years. Like the 1999 Pixar predecessor, Paddington 2 is one of the rare sequels that outshines its original.
Only four movies hold a perfect score with over 100 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment, and Paddington 2 has the most reviews of all of them, Rotten Tomatoes said.
Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-worthy coming-of-age masterpiece Lady Bird held the record briefly in 2017, but lost it when—after 196 Fresh reviews—it received a single Rotten one.
That’s how easy it is to ruin a perfect run on Rotten Tomatoes. All it takes is a contrarian critic or, in Lady Bird’s case, a reviewer who had a mixed reaction and didn’t think the movie deserved to rank among the best films of all time.
Despite the acclaim, Paddington 2 hasn’t broken any box-office records. It opened with $11 million in the North America last weekend, and was only the 7th highest grossing movie in the market that weekend (not including the Monday, which was a holiday in the US). That’s less than the nearly $19 million Paddington opened with in 2015, and the $57 million Toy Story 2 opened with when it went wide in 1999, based on Box Office Mojo data.