Armando Iannucci to Write ‘Paddington 4’ for Studiocanal

Veep creator Armando Iannucci and Simon Blackwell will write Paddington 4 for Studiocanal, with Paddington in Peru director Dougal Wilson in talks to return.

Armando Iannucci, the Emmy-winning creator of Veep and The Thick of It, is writing the fourth Paddington film, Variety confirmed Monday. His longtime collaborator Simon Blackwell joins him on the screenplay.

The pair are not where the franchise typically looks. Iannucci’s catalog runs through Westminster satire, network bureaucracy, and the ego death of midlevel staffers. He is now writing a film about a polite bear who eats marmalade sandwiches and lives in west London.

Variety’s exclusive on the writer hire and the director’s in-talks status confirms that Dougal Wilson, the British commercials and music-video veteran who made his feature debut on 2024’s Paddington in Peru, is in negotiations to return.

The Paddington franchise has now cleared $800 million in combined global box office since the first film in 2014. The 2017 sequel, Paddington 2, was for a stretch the highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes and remains a critical-consensus benchmark for family filmmaking.

Studiocanal announced the fourth installment in development earlier this year at CinemaCon. CEO and Canal+ Chief Content Officer Anna Marsh said at the time that world-renowned comedy writers had been engaged but offered no names. Variety’s reporting fills in that gap.

Iannucci’s recent run includes HBO’s space comedy Avenue 5 and the 2019 feature The Personal History of David Copperfield, which starred Paddington voice actor Ben Whishaw. Iannucci was Oscar-nominated for In the Loop’s adapted screenplay in 2010 and directed The Death of Stalin in 2017.

Blackwell’s screen credits sit in the same orbit. He co-wrote In the Loop, the Copperfield adaptation, and is the creator behind British dark comedy Breeders and the sitcom Back. He served as a key writer on Veep and The Thick of It alongside Iannucci.

The directorial handoff matters. Paul King, who directed the first two Paddington films and wrote the first solo and co-wrote the second with Simon Farnaby, set the franchise’s tonal register. King’s Paddington 2 in particular built the franchise’s critical reputation.

Wilson took over for Paddington in Peru, working from a script by Mark Burton, Jon Foster, and James Lamont. The third film traded London for Peru and shifted the visual scale outward. Producer Rosie Alison previously told Variety that Wilson was chosen partly because he was Paddingtonian, embodying the bear’s stated values.

Alison continues as producer through Heyday Films. She originated the live-action plus VFX approach to Michael Bond‘s character roughly two decades ago.

Variety’s social broadcast of the writer hire circulated widely Monday across film-industry feeds, with most reactions focused on the unexpected tonal pairing.

Production timing and release window have not been announced. A casting confirmation for the returning Brown family is also pending.

If the marmalade survives Iannucci’s pen, the franchise’s run continues.