For a company that’s notoriously precious over how its IP gets used, Disney failed to do the world a favor and prevent Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey from existing, a decision that’s got to be up there as one of the worst calls in the history of modern cinema.
While writer and director Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s take on the residents of Hundred Acre Wood was well within its rights to use the characters it did in the way that it used them, the filmmaker admitted to IndieWire that he was always operating under the potential shadow of looming legal infringement.
“I was purposely very, very conservative with how much I had [Pooh and Piglet] speak, mostly because it was kind of concerned from a legal point of view of what I could get myself into. The more I’ve got them speaking, the more likely I can get into legal trouble. So I kind of limited myself there.”
After inexplicably earning its budget back 50 times over at the box office despite being named by both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb as among the most egregious affronts to celluloid that have ever existed, the sequel is on its way to a Valentine’s Day release next year.
And yet, even though Disney technically couldn’t have prevented Blood and Honey, Frake-Waterfield did acknowledge that if the Mouse House had designs on shutting it down out of nothing but spite, there wasn’t a thing he could have done about it.
“If they wanted to, Disney could have shut us down. Like, the company is so f*cking massive, they could have just gone — even if they had no grounds for it — ‘Well, we’re suing you and we’re just gonna throw the book at you. And we’re just gonna tie you up legally. And this will not go out there.’ So there was that, that risk that even if we did everything 100 percent, they could just intentionally be litigators. But they didn’t.”
Based on the overwhelmingly negative response to Blood and Honey from everyone bar its most ardent supporters, you can’t help but feel Disney missed a trick by saving the world from such an abomination, and now we’ve got a franchise to deal with as a result. Thanks a bunch.