Credit: Jagged Edge Productions
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), the horror film based on Winnie the Pooh, garnered equal parts disdain from Disney fans and excitement from horror fans. The former turns out to be correct, and the film is now considered one of the 100 worst films of all time on Rotten Tomatoes.
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While Disney still owns the rights to its versions of the characters, the original Winnie the Pooh the book series went into the public domain on January 1, 2022. That means anyone can interpret these characters however they want, as long as they don’t look like their Disney counterparts.
The first to take advantage of this opportunity was Rhys Freke-Waterfield, who decided to interpret the characters as terrible monsters.
The plot follows what happens to the characters we’ve come to know and love after Christopher Robin leaves them to go to college.
Freke-Waterfield describes the plot thus: “Christopher Robin is drawn from them and is not [given] them food, it made life quite difficult for Pooh and Piglet… Because they had to fend for themselves so much, they basically went wild. So they have returned to their animal roots. They are no longer domesticated: they are like a vicious bear and a pig that want to roam and try to find prey.
Naturally, fans of the Disney version were shocked, but others were intrigued, calling this new subgenre “IP-sploitation.” Could this be the start of a new horror dynasty?
According to film critics, absolutely not.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is certified rotten
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Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was ripped apart by critics, earning an abysmally low 4% on Rotten Tomatoes.
This means that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey it’s not just a bad movie. It is one of the 100 worst movies ever made, sitting at number 97 among them Scary movie V (2013) and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Story (2007).
Carla Hay of Culture Mix said: “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is the very definition of bottom-of-the-mouth horror trash. It’s not scary, funny or interesting in any way. It’s just a gory movie that’s deeply misogynistic.”
Ziba Adel of The Times (UK) echoed the sentiment, stating: “Rhys Freke-Waterfield despicably desecrates your childhood and AA Milne’s beloved classic with a vaguely written, poorly acted, substandard slasher whose artistic aspirations never reach beyond creation of fast money.”
But 4% on Rotten Tomatoes means someone liked it. One of those people was Luke Y. Thompson of the AV Club, who said, “Marketing alone would have guaranteed this film a certain percentage of prying eyes, but Freak-Waterfield made sure genre fans saw everything they expected.” “
Flicks’ Luke Buckmaster took a similar view, recently praising the Pooh bear monster as a stand against capitalism.
“Pooh’s new role as monster killer is a thing of beauty, reminding us that the never-ending cycle of pop culture is — and should be — more powerful than any single capitalist enterprise.”
Audiences also seem to like the film even more, giving the film an overall audience score of 50%. That’s still not great, but it’s a lot better than 4%.
On top of it, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey made over $4 million at the box office on a budget of just $100,000. This means that not only will Freak-Waterfield be making a sequel, but he also has bigger plans for more beloved figures in the public domain.
Frake-Waterfield creates a Marvel-style expanded universe
Rhys Freke-Waterfield announced a sequel to Blood and honey before the movie is released. It is expected to be released in February 2024.
But that’s not all! At the same time, Freak-Waterfield also announced planned horror versions of Bambi called Bambi: The Payback and Peter Pan called Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare. Neither film has a set release date.
This is just the beginning of Frake-Waterfield’s ambitions. In February 2023, he told The Hollywood Reporter that he wanted to create a twisted universe that included all of these family characters from the public domain.
“The idea is that we’re going to try to imagine that they’re all in the same world so we can have crossovers. People are texting each other that they really want to see Bambi vs. Pooh.
He even mentioned that he wants to make slasher movies out of characters that haven’t made it to the public domain yet, like the Teletubbies and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
It seems when it comes to our childhood; no IP is safe.
Which classic childhood character would you like to see in horror? Let us know in the comments below.