A Budget-Boosted Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey Sequel Would Take Aim At Competitors Like M3GAN
"Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey" might be getting panned by critics, but you've got to respect filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield's hustle. When A.A. Milne's copyright on the gentle resident of Hundred Acre Wood lapsed in 2022, the British writer-director immediately got to work on his low-budget, slasher-flick profaning of the author's lovable characters. It's classic exploitation grifting to which the schlock-producing likes of Roger Corman, William Castle, and Samuel Arkoff would certainly tip their cap. The goal is to get out of the gate first and fast. You don't want to be the second guy to portray Pooh and Piglet as remorseless murderers.
Now that his film is out in the world and making loads of disreputable noise, Frake-Waterfield wants gorehounds to know that this is just the beginning. Not only is he currently working on other blood-thirsty takes on beloved children's classics (e.g. "Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare" and "Bambi: The Reckoning"), he's got further plans for his hack-happy Hundred Acre Wood duo. Basically, he's aiming to be the Jason Blum of public domain horror, and he's determined to work on a much bigger scale.
Be shameless, not ambitious
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Rhys Frake-Waterfield' placed himself in direct competition with the Blumhouse mogul. Per the director:
"I'm hoping that, at minimum, it's going to have five times the budget of the first one, but it could be substantially more than that as well, which would do absolute wonders for the film. That's one of the major challenges. It's competing with films like 'M3GAN' [and] they are made on orders of magnitude more. When you have more money for a film, you get more time, you get cooler scenes, you can really spend more time refining things."
Roger Corman would probably advise the burgeoning schlockmeister to stick to his current practice of producing 14 movies a year. Why spend more money to make your films look respectable when you are hellbent on being disrespectable? Make 'em fast and cheap and short. It's not like your target audience is paying a great deal of attention anyway. They're in their phones until someone sheds their clothes and/or gets their throat slashed.
Having perused Frake-Waterfield's filmography, I would disabuse him of the notion that he can or should play in Jason Blum's sandbox. He doesn't have access to world-class talents like Jordan Peele, James Wan, or Leigh Whannel. His competition is The Asylum. Trash like "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey" should never be made on a $12 million budget. Go small and vicious, or go home.