Sawt Falasteen - Paddington: the affable bear who became a lucrative business

Visitors to London's train stations and airports are never far from a flood of Paddington soft toys, replete with his signature red hat and blue duffle coat, displayed alongside souvenir staples like mini double-decker buses and toy royal guards.

Paddington bear toys have become a "must" with 27 million units sold since 2021, according to StudioCanal, the French film distributor that owns the rights to the character.

One family on holiday to London from Sardinia made a detour to Paddington Station –- where the character gets its name -– just to take a photo with a bronze statue of the bear.

"It's one of the attractions we wanted to see, just like Big Ben or Tower Bridge," said Carlo Piga, whose young daughter is a fan of the films.

Toys, clothes, tableware, stationery, perfumes and a thousand more licensed Paddington products exist today in addition to the 35 million books, in 40 languages, that have been sold worldwide.

"It's a brand that was perhaps a little... I don't want to say 'dormant'," said Anna Marsh, chief executive of Studiocanal.

"But in any case, we've managed to bring it up to date," she added.

- Big money -

Paddington has long been popular in the United Kingdom thanks to the books created by Michael Bond in 1958.

But the character failed to gain popularity further afield until the blockbuster success of the feature film in 2014, which made $268 million at the box office.

StudioCanal then bought the rights to develop a franchise around the bear.

It produced two new films: "Paddington 2" in 2017 ($227 million in revenue) and "Paddington in Peru", released this year.

An animated series, exhibitions and, soon, a musical have also been developed.

Retailers jumped on the bear's popularity: it appeared in prints from Next-owned fashion brand Cath Kidston, in Christmas adverts for Marks & Spencer and featured in a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

The brand has partnered with Airbnb, Primark, Zara and appeared on postcards for UN children's agency Unicef which raised $15 million in sales.

Paddington has also attracted the attention of the British royal family: Prince William attended the premiere of the film in China in 2015 while his wife Catherine danced with the bear at a charity event at Paddington Station in 2017.

Most famously, he appeared at Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee in 2022 in a humorous short film that catapulted the character into further stardom.

The media craze following this appearance generated the equivalent of £10 million ($12.5 million) in advertising sales in the United Kingdom alone, according to an estimate by French advertising agency Havas.

The bear became associated with the queen ever since and after her death, hundreds of Paddington stuffed animals were placed in front of Buckingham Palace.

- 'TikTokers' -

Today, Paddington is "within the highest value British-created characters, up there with Harry Potter and James Bond", said Luke McDonagh, an intellectual property specialist at the London School of Economics.

"It is a reasonable estimate to say the overall value of the Paddington brand is more than £1 billion," he added.

According to a Marketcast survey, the amount of respondents who knew of Paddington grew by nearly 20 percent in the United States, Germany and France, between the release of the second film in 2017 and 2023.

Visitors have been flocking to the colourful streets of Primrose Hill in north London, where dozens of tourists, sometimes with a guide, photograph the blue house featured in the films.

The throng of tourists have left some local residents unhappy.

"It's like living in a zoo," said one, lamenting visits from "the TikTokers", who, she said, spend hours crafting the perfect video and have even tried to film through the windows of her home.

W.Mansour--SF-PST