'Paddington in Peru' Now A Valentine's Day 2025 Movie

Before the advent of streaming, TV and movies ran on a cycle. Networks produced new episodes of their shows from September to May, with a long holiday break and summers off. Movies dropped their blockbusters at the top of the summer and mid-July, with the awards bait arriving from September to December. The box office bombs were discarded during the doldrums of August, plus January and February before the Oscars. Most of that has fallen by the wayside in the last decade, but January is still where films that coulda-shoula-woulda been Oscar contenders go to die.

Hence, when Sony announced that Paddington in Peru, the third film in the very popular trilogy, would be getting a mid-January 2025 release date, it seemed an odd choice. The date suggested the producers were worried that the new director, Dougal Wilson (taking over from Paul King after two hit films), might not be up to snuff and were hedging by giving it a date in the dead of winter.

These worries turned out to be unfounded. Paddington in Peru received rave reviews when it opened in the U.K. in November 2024, and now Sony is hurrying to push release dates around the calendar to give Paddington a new arrival date, Valentine's Day Weekend, which Disney and Marvel have recently turned into the first major box office weekend on the calendar.