If you go down into the Hundred Acre Wood today, you’re sure of a nasty surprise. We warned you that Disney favorites like Winnie-the-Pooh and Mickey Mouse going Public Domain would send shockwaves through the industry, and as those cuddly critters get snapped up by anyone and everyone, there’s been a boom of Disnified horror movies.
The first off the blood-soaked starting blocks was Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. Although debuting to scathing reviews in 2023, Blood and Honey made a jaw-dropping $5.2 million against a budget of just $50,000 to $100,000. Word of mouth meant Frake-Waterfield wasted no time in powering ahead with 2024’s Blood and Honey 2, while Variety has just confirmed Blood and Honey 3 is already in the works.
While the Blood and Honey movies don’t yet have the budget of the Scream series, production studios Jagged Edge and ITN are set to splash the cash on increasingly outlandish movies. Of course, this is just the start of the Twisted Childhood Universe (TCU). Frakes-Waterfield finds himself as a sort of horror Kevin Feige, already unveiling his grand plans for an Avengers-style crossover, titled Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble. Like it or not, our hand is stuck in the honey pot, and the box office bees are swarming.
Box offices and bloodshed
We’ve come a long way from found-footage horrors like The Blair Witch Project making a fortune on shoestring budgets, but as the genre evolves, so have our tastes. When not enjoying underground hits like Jordan Peele’s Get Out becoming Oscar-worthy smashes, we’re basking in the glory of Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, breathing new life into a rotted corpse.
Mixing a story we thought we knew with something new, like Leigh Whannell did with The Invisible Man, is another sweet spot, and while horror defies expectations that Hollywood has run out of ideas, that hasn’t stopped it from looking at some usual IPs for influence. In an era where Art the Clown is taking the Terrifier series to unimaginable heights, indie horror couldn’t be bigger right now. Most would’ve laughed you out of the door when pitching the idea of a Winnie-the-Pooh-inspired horror movie, but after Frake-Waterfield was one of the first to exploit our childhood favorites going PD, it’s given him a jump on the competition.
It’s a putrid cauldron of Disney rip-offs, and while we admit we’re intrigued about a rabid Bambi going full Cujo for Bambi: The Reckoning or Drag Race alumni Charity Kase playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, the failures of Disney’s live-action adaptation has us less excited for Pinocchio: Unstrung. We’re promised the likes of Sleeping Beauty and The Mad Hatter will be shoehorned into things, while Easter eggs and post-credit scenes will presumably cue the next nightmare.
Whether Frake-Waterfield will become the next Wes Craven or another Uwe Boll, he’s already got his sights on everything from Teletubbies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He struck lucky with Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter and Wendy being in PD, but as Teletubbies wasn’t released until 1997, we don’t see that one happening.
The Slaughterhouse of Mouse
Blood and Honey 2’s rave reviews (currently sitting at an 81% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes) and wider release are sure to lure in the crowds, but how much of that is morbid curiosity considering the original was panned? We’re worried it’s a case of running before you can walk, and in an earlier interview with Variety, actor-cum-producer Scott Chambers sketched out his dream roadmap to explain: “It’d have Freddy Krueger, Jason, Halloween, Scream, all of those. Obviously, that will never happen, but we can make it happen in our own little way, and that’s where this film has been born.”
Even though it’s no secret that 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason was a big hit among fans, there’s a reason plans for its sequel (set to bring Evil Dead’s Ash into the fold) was resigned to being a comic book. Equally, the Alien vs. Predator movies aren’t topping anyone’s list as franchise favorites. Given the rate that Jagged Edge and ITN are churning out entries in the Twisted Childhood Universe, it’s only natural that alarm bells are ringing. The Reckoning, Neverland Nightmare, and Unstrung are all due out by the end of the year, already screaming franchise fatigue. Even the once unshakable might of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is struggling with that, forcing the MCU to reassess with a new quantity over quality slate. Horror universes are a sticky wicket, and we’re a long way gone from Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man delivering the very first cinematic universe way back in 1943. Similarly, we can’t imagine Winnie-the-Pooh constantly popping up will match Christopher Lee playing Dracula in the Hammer Horror films.
A ‘universe’ of problems
The Poohniverse has us thinking of another recent attempt, with Universal’s Dark Universe also trying to run before it could walk. Like Frakes-Waterfield has announced its slate of upcoming movies and characters way ahead of time, the Dark Universe united the likes of Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, and Russell Crowe before the Tom Cruise-led The Mummy had even hit theaters. It was a costly mistake that inadvertently led to Blumhouse making the unconnected The Invisible Man for just $7 million when compared to The Mummy’s bloated $350 million.
We know the TCU isn’t throwing around that kind of money, but it’s hard to imagine every movie being the same financial smash as Blood-and-Honey. At least Chambers has promised some “epic sequences of monster vs. monster” action in Monsters Assemble, and like the aforementioned Freddy vs Jason, we’ll be seated on opening night to see Jiminy Cricket duke it out with Tinkerbell.
Ultimately, no one asked for this cinematic universe. If this was some long-awaited reboot akin to what the Dark Universe was trying to do with Universal’s Classic Monsters, then maybe. Then again, with the first Blood-and-Honey setting the bar so low and its sequel being something of a surprise, this is definitely the cinematic universe no one was expecting. While things are on the up for now in the Twisted Childhood Universe, something tells us you’ll need more than honey if you want us to stick around for the inevitable Poohniverse: Endgame.
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Based in Manchester, UK, Tom Chapman has over seven years’ experience covering everything from dragons to Demogorgons. Starting out with a stint at Movie Pilot in Berlin, Tom has since branched out to indulge his love of all things Star Wars and the MCU at Digital Spy, Den of Geek, IGN, Yahoo! and more. These days, you’ll find Tom channelling his inner Gale Weathers and ranting about how HBO did us dirty with Game of Thrones Season Eight.
