BBC confirms 'Paddington 2' and 'Finding Dory' for Christmas movie line-up

The BBC has revealed its Christmas movies for the festive season, with Pixar's Finding Dory in the coveted Christmas Day afternoon slot.

It's followed on Boxing Day by the UK TV premiere of the categorically perfect future classic Paddington 2.

Also among the festive movie offerings are the 2017 live-action remake of Disney's Beauty And The Beast, starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens, and 2016’s Alice Through The Looking Glass, with Johnny Depp and Anne Hathaway.

Read more: BBC’s A Christmas Carol is ‘dark and twisted’

As is now traditional, another star-studded Julia Donaldson short will be arriving (slowly) too.

This year it's The Snail And The Whale, adapted from the 2003 children's book by Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, with a voice cast including Rob Brydon, Sally Hawkins, Cariad Lloyd and Dame Diana Rigg.

Also hotly anticipated for the Beeb's festive season are new adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Dracula.

The Dickens classic, a co-production between the BBC and US network FX, will be brought to the screen in three parts, penned by Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight.

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A “haunting, hallucinatory, spine-tingling immersion into Scrooge’s dark night of the soul”, it stars Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge alongside Stephen Graham, Andy Serkis, Charlotte Riley, Kayvan Novak and Jason Flemyng.

Meanwhile, Dracula, made by Sherlock creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, will find Danish actor Claes Bang as the vampire, alongside John Heffernan, Dolly Wells and Joanna Scanlan, with Gatiss also among the acting cast.