Paddington 2 – The Greatest Film of All Time, or an Information Cascade?
When Paddington 2 was released in January of 2018, many did not know it would cement itself as a pivotal film in cinematic history. However, this sequel, involving the fictional, titular bear who originated from a series of children’s books, would stand alongside Citizen Kane in being revered as one of the greatest films of all time. Citizen Kane, at one point, was the only mass-reviewed film on Rotten Tomatoes that had a 100% “Fresh” score, meaning every critic that spoke on it gave it a positive review. Although Orson Welles’ film would eventually lose this title, Paddington 2 joined its ranks before the matter, as after 245 critic reviews, not a single one labeled the film as “rotten”; it had all positive reviews, too.
Unfortunately, Paddington 2 followed Citizen Kane’s path, going from a 100% critic rating to a 99% in May of 2021, 3 years after the film’s release. Critic Eddie Harrison, writing for Film Authority, was responsible; he thought that Paddington 2 didn’t capture the essence of the bear as he was depicted in the children’s series, even going as far as to call him “over-confident, since and sullen.” And thus, Paddington 2 fell from grace as it lost its title of being the best mass-reviewed film on Rotten Tomatoes’ site.
One might be thinking, how is this discussion on a movie inspired by a children’s book inspiring in any way? It was for myself, as I analyzed Paddington 2’s critical success and its one criticism under the lens of a phenomenon we learned about in class: I wondered if Harrison’s negative review stirred up a potential information cascade, although it wouldn’t have necessarily broken it.
What is an information cascade? From the textbook, we learned that it’s when people make decisions in a sequential order, considering the actions of earlier decision makers and inferring that which they knew before making one’s own decisions, ignoring the private information one has access to by going along with what the public has decided. This cascade begins as soon as a person’s private signal isn’t enough to overcome the public’s signals, following the decisions of past decision makers instead of considering one’s own options or opinions.
In the context of the Paddington 2 affair, it does seem as though Eddie Harrison’s negative review of the film was a deviation in a, potential, information cascade where people were deciding to rate the film positively because others had. One could contest this by saying that Rotten Tomatoes is just a collection of reviews, denying any sequential order, and that people were genuinely rating the film well up to Harrison’s review. However, to this I say that while the reviews that dropped right after the film’s release weren’t necessarily sequential, reviews following this period, in a sense, were. These were critics who had enough time to consider other critics’ perceptions of the film before reviewing it themselves, and of the 245 reviews that led up to Harrison’s 246th, the last 59 were made weeks to years after the film was released. All 59 of these lauded Paddington 2, and while one could say that these reviewers genuinely did like the film, I do wonder if an information cascade formed here. By this, I considered the possibility that these reviewers saw a movie that was being lauded by other critics in the past. They saw Paddington 2 being labeled as one of the greatest movies of all time, and decided that they couldn’t speak against this, even if they had their own reservations about it. This would entail them ignoring their private signals, or opinions here, to accept the public’s opinion as their own, insinuating the presence of a possible information cascade. However, I will say that even if Harrison’s negative review came after a long series of positive ones, we know that information cascades are only broken as soon as the difference between the number of public acceptances and rejections hit 2. With just one negative review compared to the initial positive reviews of critics that did follow their own signals, this wouldn’t have been true if the cascade existed.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch16.pdf
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/paddington_2