Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey 2 Director Won't Let Bad Reviews Stop Him
Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain in 2022, and director Rhys Frake-Waterfield immediately took full advantage. His 2023 movie "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" was a slasher film where an adult Christopher Robin finds himself being hunted down by his old childhood friends, Winnie and Piglet. It's a gory nightmare of a movie made popular by the gimmick of having its killers be the sweet, cuddly characters we've all grown up loving.
The movie was not well-received by critics, mainly because it doesn't offer a whole lot beyond the initial shock value of its premise. As /Film's own Witney Seibold put it in his review, "'Blood and Honey' will disappoint fans of Pooh, fans of irony, and fans of horror. Don't bother." But despite the movie's 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it was still a clear-cut financial success, making $5 million at the international box office despite its reported budget of under $100,000. This is particularly impressive considering the movie was aiming to make most of its profits from video-on-demand services, not its theatrical release.
The success was enough to earn the movie a sequel, as well as enough to prevent Frake-Waterfield from worrying too much about the critics. "I've kind of brushed all that aside. You've just got to keep going," he said in an interview with SFX magazine. He also noted that the negative attention is a big part of what helped the movie do so well in the first place: "That element is what's made it blow up to the kind of scale it has. It's like lightning in a bottle. It's attracting people, making the film go crazy."
Horror's always underrated anyway
Frake-Waterfield also credits some of the backlash to the horror genre being historically undervalued and misunderstood. "It doesn't really score well with critics a lot of the time," he said. "There are a lot of really great horror films out there, some of the best-known in the genre, and yet they score so badly as films."
He's not wrong; horror movies tend to be rated much lower in general by audiences and critics alike. Much of this is just because of the contrasting tastes amongst viewers and how so many horror films intentionally end on a dark note that leaves a bad taste in the audience's mouths. The 2.9 IMDb rating for the first "Blood and Honey" is still bad even by horror standards, but when you adjust with those biases in mind, it's probably more in the 3.5-4.5 rating range.
The good news for Frake-Waterfield is that with his new "Winnie-the-Pooh" movie comes a new budget, allowing him to (in theory) make something bigger and better. "Everything has upped its game," he said, "The story is vastly improved, the performances are far, far better. The look of the creatures, the prosthetics, the gore; that's all stepped up a significant amount too." Hopefully, this will lead to a better critical response the second time around. Still, all Frake-Waterfield really cares about is whether audiences stay interested enough to fund a whole trilogy:
"My plan is to let 'Winnie 2' go out there, see what the feedback is, what people liked and didn't like, and then iterate and build on it. As the audience stays there and hopefully expands, and the budgets grow, [the films are] only going to improve further and further as we try and grow this into a really solid franchise."