Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

While the illustrations from the original 1926 book went into the U.S. public domain along with its text, Frake-Waterfield had to avoid any elements that were unique to Disney's depictions of the character.

On May 24, 2022, Josh Korngut of Dread Central reported that a Winnie-the-Pooh-based horror film adaptation was in development.[5] The characters' rights had been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1966 and, while Disney retains exclusive rights to the depictions of these characters from their own franchise, the first Winnie-the-Pooh book went into the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2022.[6] After the copyright lapsed, Rhys Frake-Waterfield began development on Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey the same year.[6] Speaking to Variety, Frake-Waterfield described the plot as both Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet turning into homicidal maniacs after Christopher Robin leaves them for college. He stated:

Christopher Robin is pulled away from them, and he's not [given] them food, it's made Pooh and Piglet's life quite difficult... Because they've had to fend for themselves so much, they've essentially become feral. So they've gone back to their animal roots. They're no longer tame: they're like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey.[7]

The masks used for Pooh and Piglet in the film were created by the American prosthetic-mask manufacturing company Immortal Masks.[8] On February 16, 2023, Frake-Waterfield explained in an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment that the first draft of the film was meant to be more close to the original source material. However, The Walt Disney Company still retained the exclusive rights to the depictions of these characters from their own franchise, so Waterfield had to scrap the original script and rewrote it to avoid any legal trouble.[9]

Ashdown Forest, which is known for being the setting of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, was used as the filming location for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, where it was shot for 10 days.

Principal photography for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey began in April 2022, with filming taking place in the Ashdown Forest of East Sussex, England over a period of 10 days.[10][2] Jagged Edge Productions produced the film in collaboration with ITN Studios.[11] Frake-Waterfield did outfit Pooh with a red shirt, but was careful to avoid other iconic elements from Disney's depictions that could pose a copyright issue.[6]

After the increased popularity of the film, ITN gave the film an increased budget, leading to several days of reshoots. This would lead to the film being the most expensive film Waterfield ever directed and the most expensive film produced by ITN, with a budget of under $100,000.[12][2]

In July 2022, American composer Andrew Scott Bell was announced as a provider for the score.[13][14] On July 14, 2022, Bell uploaded a video to YouTube titled "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood, Honey, and Violins" that documented how he drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with his manager Mike Rosen, to collect a honeycomb-filled violin from an experimental luthier to compose the film's soundtrack.[15] In an interview with Dread Central, Bell explained how he got involved with the production of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey upon hearing about the film after it went viral upon the announcement. He said:

Back in late May, a day or so before the film went massively viral, I started seeing some online chatter about a Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie. I remember looking it up on IMDb and finding the director Rhys Frake-Waterfield on Instagram where his story had a screenshot of a person's comment saying something to the effect of "your movie is ruining our childhoods". His reaction was, "that's what I'm trying to do, ruin everyone's childhood".[16]

After the film's announcement, Salon writer Kelly McClure wrote the film is "a perfect example of the wrong that could come from a creative work slipping into public domain." She continued, calling the film a "horrific take" on Winnie-the-Pooh, also stating "you've got the makings of a dark and twisted cult classic."[25] Jon Mendelsohn, writing for Collider, called the film images "nightmare fuel" and the concept "extremely bizarre" while noting "the internet is freaking out."[26] Rotem Rusak, writing for Nerdist, wrote, "Seeing the iconic bear reimagined as a nightmarish slasher monster speaks to a delightfully imaginative spirit that really inspires us."[27] Justin Carter of Gizmodo wrote:

The appeal of Blood and Honey will depend entirely on if you're willing to meet the movie halfway on its premise, and aren't immediately turned off by the idea of children's characters being turned into murderers or having some dark, edgy backstory. The internet was filled with that sort of thing just a decade or so ago, and this feels like it's very much pulling from that same cloth.[28]

Katarina Feder of Artnet wrote, "...you can't buy publicity like the kind they've had and something tells me that this indie passion project will find its funding, bringing to life the director's unique ideas about murdering women in bikinis."[29]

In the United Kingdom, a collector's edition was released on Blu-ray on April 5, 2023.[30] A more basic release came out on April 14, 2023. It got a digital release on Amazon Prime in the United States on April 11, 2023.[31] On June 2, 2023, it got a widespread release across many streaming platforms such as iTunes and Vudu.

As of April 19, 2023, Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey has grossed $2 million in the United States and Canada, and $3 million in other territories, including over $1 million in Mexico, for a worldwide total of $5.2 million.[32][3][4]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 3% of 58 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 2.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "Oh, bother."[33] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 16 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike".[34]

Christian Zilko of IndieWire scored the film a grade C+, panning the film's screenplay, but felt that the film "punches above its weight" in the craftsmanship of its kills.[35] Awarding the film a similar score, Luke Thompson of The A.V. Club offered similar criticism towards the cheap production values and lack of a coherent story, while also noting that the film fulfills its promise of a slasher film based on a beloved children's book.[36] Polygon's Tasha Robinson felt that certain elements such as the gore and inherent grotesqueness of the material worked well, but added that the film's poor dialogue, lack of humour, and connection to its basic source material ruined an interesting premise.[37]

Dennis Harvey of Variety was highly critical of the film for its lack of humour, poor acting, and incoherent screenplay, summarising that the film "fail[ed] to meet even the most basic expectations set up by its conceptual gimmick".[38] In his review for Rue Morgue, Michael Gingold felt that the film lacked any sort of wit or imagination to successfully implement upon its premise; Gingold additionally pointed out the "drab" cinematography, absence of characterisation for its title villain, and messy production only served to make the film easily forgettable.[39] Rating the film 1.5 out of 4 stars, Nick Allen from RogerEbert.com wrote that it failed as both a comedy and a horror film, noting the poorly lit scenes in the film made it hard to decipher what was happening on screen, while echoing other critics' sentiments on the writing and lack of interesting characters.[40]

In June 2022, Frake-Waterfield expressed interest in creating a sequel, and stated that he wants to "ramp it up even more and go even crazier and go even more extreme".[41] In November 2022, he announced that a sequel, currently titled Winnie-the-Pooh 2, was in development with him returning as director and writer, on a budget "five times" larger than the previous installment. The sequel is expected to begin filming in late 2023,[42] with an anticipated release date of February 2024.[2] In August 2023, Frake-Waterfield announced that Pooh will use a chainsaw as a weapon in the sequel.[43][44][45] That September, Pooh, and Piglet were confirmed to have new designs in teaser images,[46] with the new characters Owl and Tigger also confirmed to appear.[47]

Alongside the announcement of a sequel, two other horror films were announced: Bambi: The Reckoning and Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare based on Bambi, a Life in the Woods and Peter and Wendy respectively.[48][49][50] In February 2023, Frake-Waterfield announced that the various projects take place in the same shared continuity franchise, while Jagged Edge Productions intends to eventually have crossovers featuring the characters.[51]

Frake-Waterfield also expressed interest in making films about Thor, the Norse god of thunder,[52] as well as copyrighted franchises such as Teletubbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.[53]