Released Wednesday, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has already made over $1.8 million in box office receipts from its less than $100,000 budget. That more than justifies a bigger budget for the sequel, but with its almost record-breaking negative reviews, will there be any fans lining up to watch it?
With a 4.5/10 IMDb score, a fan might think it’s watchable until they learn of the 9 percent Rotten Tomatometer score that says fans don’t really approve. Taking innocent childhood characters and turning them into villains in a horror story is a mind-bending genre that only a few diehards would be able to stomach. Of course, dialog and plot haven’t really been the horror genre’s strong points and didn’t have to be as long as there was blood and guts to watch splatter all over the screen.
Director Rhys Waterfield told Entertainment Weekly, “Number two is already going into development.” He went on to say, “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. So I’m really excited for what the second film’s going to do.”
A sequel?
Despite the fact that critics are far from in love with this film, it’s box office performance has been phenomenal, showing that fans don’t always listen to critics.
The film was made on less than $100,000 and it has the ability to touch fans as well as give them the gore they’ve been waiting for.
Congrats! Just leaving movie theater now and we thought it was amazing. The g0re was AWESOMEEE but ahhh when pooh said “you left” at the end that hit hard, poor pooh
— jazzlyn :p (@yulovejaz) February 17, 2023
Some fans might have found the genre hilarious because it’s twisting the old children’s stories to put blood in the honey, but some fans are taking it a whole different way. Pooh was abandoned by Christopher Robbin, and that hits them in the heart.
Thank you for this master class indie horror. This movie did what most horror does not and hit me right in the feels especially that ending.
— Morgan Smith (@morgan8053) February 17, 2023
Pooh, played by Craig David Dowsett, is happy he did his job.
im glad i made you cry
— Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (@poohbandh) February 17, 2023
Out only in theaters at this point, it might not take long for the film to hit the popular streaming platforms as well as other twisted projects in the works. “Yeah, Bambi‘s coming. Bambi. Pooh 2,” Waterfield said. “[But] I’m looking to find other concepts and other retellings which aren’t just IP. Then I’ll see the next one I’m going to get fully attached to.”
