Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 premiered on March 18 in London, ahead of its March 26 release date. It received a perfect score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, a stark improvement from the first installment’s abysmal critical reception. It’s not unheard of for sequels to outperform original releases, but if we take into consideration that 2023’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has only 3% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, we have to wonder what’s really going on. Is this score enough to save the franchise from the abysmal performance of the original?
The original Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was released in 2023 as an independent slasher film that was written, produced, and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield. It’s a horror reimagining of A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard’s Winnie-the-Pooh books and the first installment in the Twisted Childhood Universe (TCU), in which Pooh and Piglet have become feral murderers. The iconic childhood icons are now terrorizing a group of young women and Christopher Robin, following his return to the Hundred Acre Wood five years after leaving for college.
The movie received overwhelmingly negative reviews, with some critics considering it to be one of the worst films ever made. It even received five Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture — “outperforming” 2004’s Catwoman. Despite that, the movie did have a mixed reception among audiences — because some liked the movie — and it ended up being a commercial success, having earned $5.2 million against its $50,000 budget.
Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow and great artists steal,” alluding to the fact that real genius often involves the insightful recombination of known elements to achieve something exceptional. Just look at For Whom the Bell Tolls; Hemingway took known elements such as war, love, loyalty, the complexities of human nature, and the philosophical contemplation of death and combined them into a novel that tells a compelling story and explores some really profound themes.
We’re not comparing Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey with For Whom the Bells Tolls; that would be out of line. But the same principle applies. Somewhere along the way, the horror genre became, well, less horror and more cheap thrills and jump scares. Nearly every scene that’s supposed to be even remotely scary follows the same recipe: a character is suddenly alone, they hear the noise, follow it, they see something, and their curiosity gets the better of them. Then the sound mix goes down to zero, and … BOOM! A jumpscare. And it’s only rinse-and-repeat, turning horror into action.
There’s no dread in modern horror, and most certainly no originality and no true genius. However, what the 2023 Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey did — while certainly not genius — was original. It fared badly with the critics due to quality, but a mixed audience score signaled two things: modern horror audiences are conditioned to synonymize big-budget jumpscare-filled action movies with horror, and there is a market for a Twisted Childhood Universe.
The recently released Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 proves just that. People like the idea of Winnie-the-Pooh being a feral murderer or the idea of Little Red Riding Hood’s adaptation of the original Brothers Grimm’s tale — the one in which the wolf eats both the grandma and Little Red Riding Hood and then takes a nap. Or The Company of Wolves; that is a good adaptation. However, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2‘s 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes is a myth, which has since been busted.
Yes, the movie did originally have that score, but we have to account for two things: movie critics often pass on sequels to movies they didn’t like unless the movies are produced by a major studio. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey wasn’t produced by a major studio, and it most certainly wasn’t loved by the critics, which means that not a lot of critics have seen the second film. Second, there’s a lot of “gatekeeping” when it comes to online reviews, implying that the initial score was artificially blown out of proportion to deter some critics from scoring the movie lower on the scoreboards.
Since its release, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2‘s score on Rotten Tomatoes has fallen down to 50%, earning it a Rotten status. However, the audience score is currently at 80%, which only affirms our previous statement about the existence of a market that inserts fear into a cultural tent pole of our collective childhood. So much so that Frake-Waterfield announced the development of the third Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey movie, as well as Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble crossover event. This will feature iconic public domain of characters, such as Bambi, Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, and Pinocchio, in horror settings.
In the end, a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes isn’t enough to salvage the franchise, especially if we factor in that the score dropped to 50% in the days following Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2‘s release. However, movies aren’t made for the critics; they’re made for the ticket-buying audiences. The audiences have spoken: not only does the Winnie-the-Pooh franchise deserve the attention of global horror fans, but it also deserves its own cinematic universe. If you’re into horror, that is.