The trend for reinventing family-friendly favorites as the stars of hardcore slasher movies is going to die out sooner rather than later, but the team behind Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey isn’t going to care.
The bizarre adaptation of the iconic bear and his familiar faces – with the exception of Tigger for legal reasons – has been gathering buzz as a viral sensation ever since it was first confirmed to be a very real thing. Maybe it’s morbid curiosity, or maybe it’s a genuinely well-crafted slice of gnarly blood-splattered cinema, but audiences are turning up in their droves.
At the moment, Blood and Honey is only playing on the big screen in Mexico, but it is coming to domestic screens next Friday. However, it’s already fast closing in on the $1 million mark, meaning that the project is knee-deep in the red in more ways than one given its minuscule $15,000 production budget.
Much like Terrifier 2 and Skinamarink before it, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is proving that a wave of online momentum that captures the imaginations of social media can reap huge profits, and there’s almost definitely going to be a slew of imitators landing sooner rather than later.
We’ve already seen Grinch-inspired The Mean One, with Bambi also on the cards for a gory reinvention, but the real question is how quickly it’s going to take audiences to tire of seeing the same familiar formula before they begin to lose interest. Based on Blood and Honey, though, it’s happening in the immediate future.
