Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011)

Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011) Full Recap

When Tom Popper is a little boy, he barely ever sees his dad. His father is an explorer who travels to the far corners of the world, and the only way they talk is through an old shortwave radio. Every night, Tom sits in his bedroom and waits for that crackling voice. This is Mama Bird.

Over and out. His dad calls in from Marrakesh, from Papua, New Guinea, from places Tom can only dream about. Then one night, his father tells him he won't make it home for his birthday again. "Opportunities like this are hard to find," he says. The little boy turns off the radio and sits alone in his room.

"Come in. Are you there?" Years later, Tom is all grown up and he's become a real estate hotshot in New York City. He walks down Fifth Avenue on the phone, closing deals before he even gets to the office. His assistant, Pippy, can't say a sentence without using a dozen words that start with P.

Tom's job is to convince people to sell their buildings. And he's the best there is. When an old man gets cold feet, Tom tells him a wild story about sailing around the world, storms, a broken mast, and a blue whale rising out of the sea. By the end of it, the man is staring out the window, dreaming about the ocean, and he signs.

Tom tells him he'll get out there someday. The three old partners who run the firm are so impressed that they offer Tom a spot at their table, but first he has to close one more deal. They want Tavern on the Green, an old restaurant in Central Park. Their plan is to tear it down and build something new.

Tom's smile freezes for a second, but he tells them he does deals like this in his sleep. Tom is divorced and his kids live with their mom, Amanda. When he shows up to pick them up for the weekend, Amanda's new friend, Rick, greets him at the door with a big hug, then another, then another. His son Billy wants to show off his soccer kick.

Tom plays goalie in the living room, and Billy fires his best shot. Tom makes the save. His daughter Janie is a different story. She doesn't want to spend the weekend with him at all. Tom sits down to talk, but every joke he makes lands wrong. Janie tells him this is exactly why she doesn't want to go.

So Tom goes home alone. Back at his apartment, there's a message waiting. His father has died on an expedition to Antarctica. Tom sits in the dark and listens to the message twice. Then he gets up and goes about his business like nothing happened. No little ones. this weekend, Mr.

P. At the reading of the will, the old explorer leaves almost everything to the Geographic Society. But to his little Tommy, he sent a souvenir. He's sorry he couldn't deliver this one in person. On Monday, a huge wooden crate arrives at Tom's door. Van Gundi is at the tavern already.

He opens it up and finds a penguin inside. He figures it's stuffed. A weird gift for the man who has everything. Then the penguin moves. It's alive. His father mailed him a real live penguin and it's staring right at him. It's too big for a snow globe. Tom is already late for the biggest meeting of his life.

He points at his fancy Italian couch and tells the bird not to touch anything. Then he races out the door. The meeting is at Tavern on the Green with its owner, Selma Van Gundy. She's an elegant old lady who's turned down a thousand offers. The restaurant has been in her family for three generations, and she introduces Tom to her cooks and her handyman like their family.

She asks about his kids and his father, and Tom dodges every question with a smooth line. Van Gundy isn't impressed. She tells him she won't sell to anyone until she knows what they're worth. Then she ends the meeting. Tom gets home and calls his father's crew in Antarctica to send the penguin back.

The line is terrible and the man on the other end barely speaks English. Tom keeps shouting that he needs to send a penguin. The man thinks Tom wants five more penguins. Meanwhile, the penguin has turned the bathroom into a swimming pool. Tom calls animal control, but the guy says penguins aren't in his manual.

Hey, animal control. Got to call about a bird. So, Tom tries to shoe the bird out of the building himself. He walks it to the lobby, points toward the south pole, and tells it to keep going. A minute later, the doorman brings it right back up. Pets aren't allowed in the building, so Tom has to pay the doorman to look the other way.

His nosy neighbor, Kent, hears the honking through the wall and knocks on the door. Tom swears it's just his TV. Then he calls Pippy and tells her he's not coming into work. He has a pest problem. It's a penguin. The next day, a new crate shows up. Tom opens it and five more penguins pop out.

Now he has six of them, and they're everywhere. One is on top of the cabinet. One won't stop honking. Another bites anyone who gets close, and Billy's birthday party is in 10 minutes. Tom tries to catch them one by one, but they slip out of his hands every time. Amanda and the kids arrive for the party.

Janie tells everyone her dad forgot the present, as usual. Then Billy spots the penguins and he thinks they're his birthday present. It's the best birthday ever. Tom has to make up names on the spot. Captain, Loudy, Bitey, Stinky, Lovey, and Nimrod. Best birthday ever. While the kids build a fort, Amanda asks where on earth he found six penguins.

Tom tells her they came from his dad. Then he mentions like it's nothing that his father has died. Amanda can't believe he's acting fine about it. Then there's a knock. It's Nat Jones from the New York Zoo, and he's here to take the penguins. I can keep them. He warns Tom that they'll get sick in an apartment, but Tom can't take them away on his son's birthday, so he sends Nat away.

Out in the hall, Nat makes a secret phone call. Inside, Billy makes his dad promise that the penguins are his to keep. Janie tells Billy to make him say the words. Tom promises, "I don't know, kids." Now Tom is stuck with six penguins who won't let him sleep. They honk all night.

They steal his remote. Wherever he goes, they follow him around the apartment. He gives them a lecture about the rules of the house, and they just stare at him. At the office, the partners want to know why Van Gundy turned him down flat. You know that she's the chair of several charitable foundations.

They warn him that his name won't go on their marble slab until he closes the deal. Pippy finds out that penguins sometimes treat a person like their parent. They also calm down in the cold, so Tom cranks the air conditioning until his whole apartment is covered in snow. When the kids come over, they find their dad bundled up in a freezing apartment.

Then Tom has an idea. He takes everyone to the snowy park. It turns into a soccer game with Nimrod on defense and Bitey going after everybody's ankles. Janie says she's too cool to play with her dad. 2 minutes later, she's knocking him flat on his back. Tom is lying in the snow and his kids are laughing.

Back at the building, the doorman stops them with a grin. He just got new contact lenses. Now he can see all six illegal pets, so Tom has to pay him off again. When Amanda comes to pick up the kids, Billy and Janie beg to stay the night. Amanda says yes. She's also going away on a 3-week trip to Ghana, and she asks if the kids can spend a few nights with Tom.

That night, Billy and Janie fall asleep in front of the TV with the penguins curled up around them. Tom's next chance with Van Gundy is a fancy charity ball at the Guggenheim Museum. He hires a babysitter and tells her to just put the penguins in front of the TV. They love old Charlie Chaplain movies.

Then Tom heads out in his tuxedo. Down the hall, Kent is telling the building manager he hears honking and floppy feet coming from Tom's apartment. At the Guggenheim, Tom tries to win Van Gundy over with champagne, and Pippy whispers that the old lady only drinks one brand. She tastes it and calls it a ghastly vintage.

She tells him this is the event of the season, and she won't let anything disrupt it, especially him. Tom asks her to dance anyway. Then Tom hears honking. His penguins have followed him all the way to the museum. They come sliding down the long spiral ramp of the Guggenheim and run straight through the party.

Guests scream and dive out of the way. The evening Van Gundy planned so carefully turns into total chaos and Tom has no way to explain it. Van Gundy looks him in the eye and tells him she doesn't want him anywhere near her life. Tom calls Pippy and tells her the Guggenheim was a fiasco.

He needs another meeting with Van Gundy pronto. The next day, Janie is upset about something at school, and Tom tries to help. So, there it is. But his advice is terrible. He tells her to forget about it and move on. Amanda pulls him aside. Maybe Janie doesn't want advice. Maybe she just wants her dad to listen, so Tom practices listening on Captain.

After a lot of honking, he figures out what she wants, and it's a slide across the floor. Soon, all the penguins are sliding through the apartment. That night, the kids and the penguins sit down for dinner together, and Tom puts on a little dance show for them. Then Janie tells him she's been invited to a school dance and she needs a dress.

Tom takes her shopping. When she steps out in a blue dress, he tells her she looks beautiful. For once, Janie doesn't roll her eyes. She gives her dad a hug right there in the store. Back home, Tom finds the penguins gathered around something. The penguins have laid three eggs. Billy wants to know if they're getting baby penguins or a three penguin omelette.

Tom calls Amanda right away and she comes over to see. Hey, look who's a new dad again, huh? Everybody crowds around the nest of little stones. Penguin parents spend weeks apart hunting for fish, Tom says. But they always find each other again. Van Gundy calls for another meeting at the tavern, and Tom brings Amanda along.

When they sit down, Tom can't stop looking at one table in the corner. Then he tells her something he's never told anyone. That was his table. Whenever his dad came home, he brought Tom here and gave him a souvenir from his travels. It was about the only time Tom ever got to see him.

Amanda can't believe that in 15 years of marriage. He never told her that. When they get back, Nat Jones is inside the apartment checking the eggs. He says Tom is feeding the birds fish sandwiches and parking them in front of the TV. Tom says he gives them love. Nat holds up a fish and all six penguins follow him.

Love, he says, means whoever is holding the fish. Sooner or later, he's taking them. Whoever is holding the fish. So Tom becomes a penguin expert. He orders buckets of squid and builds an ice shelf right in his living room. He keeps it at exactly 28°, just the way baby penguins like it.

The kids come over and turn the place into a winter playground with sleds and snowmen and a hockey game in the hallway. When Nat shows up again, he gets a snowball right in the face and leaves. One night, Tom wakes up the kids. Something is happening. The eggs start to crack and two fluffy baby penguins wiggle out.

The whole family watches in awe. Tom tells the kids the little ones remind him of them, but the third egg doesn't hatch. It's captains. The days go by and she sits on it without moving. Tom promises Billy he'll call the second it hatches. Any day now. Captain's still waiting to be a dad.

Tom stops going to work. He sleeps on the floor next to Captain's egg. When the partners show up at his door, they find an apartment full of snow and a man who looks like he hasn't slept in weeks. They ask about the tavern. Tom tells them it's just one more egg, so they fire him.

Tom keeps holding on. He holds the egg and waits for a sign. any sign. He tries everything he can think of, even holding it under a heat lamp on the snowy roof, but nothing happens. The egg is never going to hatch. Nat Jones knocks again and says, "Maybe he should take care of the penguins for a while.

This time, Tom lets him." The very next day, Tom marches back into the office and jokes that he's decided to take the partners back. They hire him again on the spot. They've been playing hard ball with Van Gundy's family and she's holding a press conference tomorrow. When Amanda and the kids come over, the apartment is empty.

Tom tells them the penguins are at the zoo and it's the best place for them. Billy can't believe his dad sent them away to a cage. Tom says they're just birds and they don't feel things the way people do. Janie reminds him that she saw him with that egg. He did care. He tells her that was just a dream and it's time to wake up.

You sent them away to some cage. That night, Tom sits alone in his empty apartment in the broken pieces of the first crate. He finds an envelope he never noticed. It's a letter from his father. The old explorer writes that once a penguin loves you, it never leaves your side. He's sorry it took him so long to learn that.

He asks Tom to hold his little ones as close as he can for as long as he can. Tom reads it twice. Then he puts on his coat. The next morning, Tom picks up the kids in his big black car. They're still mad and they don't want to go to his stupid press conference. But they aren't going to the press conference.

They're going to the zoo to get their penguins back. Then Tom calls Amanda and asks her not to leave on her trip. He wants her to come with them. A few minutes later, she's in the car, too. At the zoo, they find the penguin pool, but these aren't their guys. In his office, Nat admits what he's been planning all along.

The zoo already has plenty of penguins. He's trading Tom's birds to other zoos. Three to Washington, three to Tokyo, and the babies to Dubai. Tom tells him he can't split them up. They are a family. The kids begnat to at least let them say goodbye, and he tells them the birds are already gone.

They're just birds. Just birds. Then Tom hears honking from a back room. The penguins are still there. Bitey chomps on Nat and the family locks him in. They grab the birds, throw on face masks, and march them out like a disease control team. The penguins waddle behind them in a perfect line.

And nobody dares to come near the strange team, yelling about bird flu. At the car, they count the penguins and they're one short. Captain is stuck up on the roof with zoo guards closing in. Nat lunges for her, misses, and ends up smacking himself in the face. Captain looks down and jumps.

Then, for the first time in her life, Captain flies. She glides right over the guards and down to her family. The family jumps into the car and races off to tavern on the green. Captain's flying. At the tavern, Van Gundy is about to announce her sale to the press. Tom bursts in and begs her not to sell, not even to him.

Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011) Ending Explained

If she sells it to him, he'll just tear it down and all her staff will be out on the street. This place is a part of his history. His father used to bring him here. Then Nat Jones storms in with the police and says Tom stole the penguins from the zoo. Nat tells everyone that penguins only love whoever holds the fish, so he holds one out.

The penguins walk right past it and line up behind Tom. Even Captain walks over to him. The whole room cheers. Van Gundy picks up the phone and calls her old friend, the mayor. Within minutes, the police are taking Nat away for trading animals behind everyone's back. Van Gundy congratulates Tom.

The tavern is his. She remembered his name from the very first day. She just needed to be sure that little boy who used to sit at that table hadn't gotten lost somewhere. And Tom isn't going to tear it down. He's going to fix it up. A while later, the tavern is reopened and looking beautiful.

Tom sits down with his family and tells them he's going on a very long trip, very far away, and he needs them to come with him. Janie hopes it's somewhere warm. It isn't. The whole family flies to Antarctica to bring the penguins home. Their birds waddle into a colony of thousands, and it's a family reunion.

Captain seems unsure at first. Then they notice something under her. She's laid a new egg. Tom names it bald eagle after his father and promises Captain they'll be back to meet it. Billy tells Captain she's the coolest gift he ever got. The family waves goodbye as their penguins disappear into the crowd.

Tom spent his whole life chasing deals the same way his father chased adventures until six penguins taught him what really mattered. What would you do if a crate of penguins showed up at your door?