Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has now opened in theaters!
The movie has already gone viral after playing in theaters for a short time. Following their views, people have started to post reviews on social media. Most surprisingly, the initial response has been largely positive, with some even hopeful that the videos will become a franchise.
After the announcement of the movie, Winnie and Pooh’s widely held stereotype of a good-hearted, happy, honey-bellied man had been utterly destroyed within a few weeks. On May 25 last year, a new Pooh surfaced on the poster for the upcoming slasher-horror movie Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey.
This Pooh was an axe-wielding, snarling, terrifying half-man, half-bear. After the picture became viral online, there appeared to be two separate camps of reaction. While one side appeared to laugh it off, the other was horrified. There were petitions filed against the movie’s release.
Only five months after Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain, a man had created an entire horror movie based on the character and had started planning its release.
The man behind this horror-slasher movie is the British filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who until recently held a position with an electric provider in addition to his side job producing low-budget horror movies.
After making his directorial debut, Waterfield is now in charge of what could end up being one of the most successful movie releases of 2023.
The movie release was initially planned as a streaming release with a single-day theatrical run in the US. The movie is now being released in theaters around the world as a result of the unexpected online virality of the movie’s posters and trailers.
The movie had its world premiere on January 29 in Mexico, where it debuted locally in February. In its first week, it earned an estimated $700,000.
The Idea Of Changing Something That Was Never A Monster Into A Monster
As to be expected, the idea for this project first came to Frake-Waterfield and Scott Jeffrey, his co-producer at the London-based horror production company Jagged Edge, when they learned that Pooh Bear had entered the public domain.
These men wanted something different and strange from what we are seeing nowadays. There are so many monsters, werewolves, and zombies in the horror genre. They tried to come up with fresh hooks and themes which stand out.
They have approached different directions such as Cinderella, Wizard of Oz, or something like that. But for them, none of them was enough. Frake-Waterfield didn’t feel excited when heard about a horror movie based on one of these stories. After researching and going through many characters and books, he finally reached the Pooh.
According to Frake-Waterfield, the Pooh possessed some unknown factor that made him choose it for the movie. He was aware that turning the Pooh into some six-foot murderer with a bit of a strange face would carry great risk. But he felt it had something they were looking for and thus ended up doing the movie on a very low budget.
He accepted the lead after deciding it was a risk he was willing to take and pitched the movie to their distributor ITN Studios, who co-financed the movie with the production firm. Finding out what he could actually adapt from the character of Winnie Pooh’s book was the next task.
Thus Frake-Waterfield made a point to only draw from the iconic children’s book that created Winnie the Pooh, written by A.A. Milne in 1926. It was due to rights concerns.
Tigger, one of Pooh’s most popular buddies isn’t adapted to Blood and Honey because the 1926 book didn’t include him and Disney still owns the copyright to him.
The next concern that Frake-Waterfield had was turning Winnie the Pooh scary. For this, he has chosen the major theme of the movie as abandonment. Then he started writing the plot for the movie.
After leaving the Hundred Acre Wood for college many years before, Christopher Robin returns to Blood and Honey as an adult.
He discovers his once best buddy Winnie the Pooh and Piglet there, who were previously domesticated and hunting for meat, blood, and drool hanging from their muzzles and prepared to go on a killing spree in revenge for Robin leaving them all those years ago.
Frake-Waterfield handled his initial problem of how to make the beloved bear terrifying by including lots of blood and guts throughout the movie and openly exploiting the obvious distress of many on seeing these beloved childhood characters become savage. The second concern that hung over him was the legal situation and copyright involving Winnie the Pooh.
Pooh by Waterfield now has a trademark of its own. Frake-Waterfield turned the bear into one that is full of guts and fluff, making it different from Disney’s version. Instead of the small red shirt, he dressed the bear in a lumberjack shirt, an eBay mask, and dishwashing gloves.
The criticism that the movie Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey had to face since its announcement seems to have increased its popularity. A sequel to this movie can be expected and has been approved.
Frake-Waterfield is currently developing several additional projects that will transform childhood characters such as Bambi and Peter Pan into horror movies.
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What Horror Is To Be Expected Next? Is It Bambi And Peter Pan?
As we mentioned earlier, a sequel to Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’s announcement can be expected soon.
According to Frake-Waterfield, the feedback and reviews of how people have taken the movie will determine whether to have a sequel or not. The movie had positive reviews so far since its release yesterday. Now, let’s hope for the best.
There have been reports that Frake-Waterfield’s next horrors will be based on Bambi and Peter Pan.
According to Frake-Waterfield, his crew has already completed more than 65 pages of the script for Bambi: The Reckoning, a previously announced bloody take on the hapless baby deer. He affirms that it would likely be his next project.
He is reportedly working on Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare. But he said that it is not that far into development at the moment even though he has a concept for the plot.
He also has the concept of turning Teletubbies into something strange. It looks exactly like aliens and has a really strange outlook. He assumes that there is something that he could do with those characters.
Frake-Waterfield loves doing retelling. According to him, retelling the stories or recreating many characters is unique and different and is so exciting for him. He is trying to do more on this. So let’s wait and see what Frake-Waterfield comes up with in the coming years.
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