If you haven’t seen Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, we’re begging you — don’t subject yourself to whatever that was supposed to be. If you truly have a desperate, insatiable urge to watch a terrible movie about a bear going on a murderous rampage, just watch Cocaine Bear instead. If you watched Blood and Honey with higher expectations than absolute garbage, there’s no hope for you now. Oh, and guess what? If you haven’t heard, there are even more similar Disney projects on the way, such as Bambi: The Reckoning and Cinderella’s Curse. In the spirit of pure jest, we also have our own suggestions for the next horror-driven children’s spin-off.
Shockingly, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey made $5 million at the box office, but we’re willing to bet half of that comes from teenagers illegally recording in the theater only to digitally develop the footage at a later date and paste fart noises over it. We’re betting the same fate for Sleeping Beauty’s Massacre, which is apparently a thing.
According to Bloody Disgusting’s report, the spin-off will be a “gory retelling” of the classic fairytale, which sees Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) placed under the spell of an evil mistress (Maleficent) before the sun sets on her 16th birthday. It takes the true love’s kiss of a handsome Prince Charming to awaken Sleeping Beauty from her slumber. Louisa Warren (Cinderella’s Curse) will be directing and producing, while Jasmine Ebony Thomas will pen the screenplay. The film is set to commence shooting this August in the U.K. Oh goodie.
And that news comes hot on the heels of Cinderella’s Curse, also a — you guessed it — gory retelling of the classic fairytale. We’re not sure where this new trend of crossing over Disney with horror came from, but it’s almost as bad of an idea as Disney’s live-action remakes. Almost. In general, the horror genre is a dying breed; it’s had some hits over the last decade, take Hereditary, Get Out, and The Witch as prime examples. However, creators are running short on innovative concepts, so it seems the same old narratives have been through the wringer more times than we can count.
In these trying times, horror needed something big to overtake up-and-coming action, comedy, and drama films. But what did it get? Blood and Honey… and its hideous offspring.
Who gathered in the writer’s room and approved this pitch? We’d love to have words with them. It’s one thing to massacre Eeyore and send Pooh and Piglet out for blood, it’s an entirely other thing to mess with classic Disney princesses, especially when the House of Mouse is far beyond its glory days. We’re not in the Renaissance Era anymore; you can’t just make a meerkat and a warthog sing and think it’ll reel in the big bucks. What is this? 1994?
I’ll admit it, there’s some humor to these crossovers, but that’s where the curiosity and fascination end. If you told five-year-old me that in 20-so years’ time, there’d be an absolute butchering of Winnie the Pooh, she’d have laughed in your face. Now, in my early 20s, I’m more scarred by Disney than entertained, and the same can certainly be said for the horror genre. Some brainiacs figured that since both Disney and horror were down and out, combining them would save both genres simultaneously. How’s that working out for you, whoever you are?
We used to hold our breath for the next Insidious sequel, wondering if it would ever top the original, but now, we’re just hoping and praying that someone pulls an Uno reverse card on the mad scientist behind these abominations and slaughters their creativity for good. It isn’t all bad, though, at least Evil Dead Rise pulled the dead weight, and there’s still The Boogeyman and several exciting sequels on the horizon, such as The Nun 2 and Saw X. Wait, did I say The Nun 2? I meant The Exorcist remake. I’m fully expecting The Nun 2 to be worse than its predecessor and only marginally better than Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.
