In the past few years, there have been more than a few films in Hollywood that took childhood classic characters, that symbolize innocence and purity and turned them into something horrid and dark.
The Winnie the Pooh horror film is the perfect example. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey follows the story of a setting where Christopher Robin goes to show his fiance to his childhood friends, only to find out that things have drastically changed.
The concept is something that hasn’t been seen before and stirred a lot of conversation. Despite this, it would seem that the film could not pass two of the biggest loops that any film has to pass to be relevant and successful; audience and critics.
The 2023 film scored embarrassingly in both of the categories, unfortunately turning itself into the laughingstock of the horror community. The director of the film has a very specific reason in mind to blame for the performance, and it is something no one would have expected.
Winnie the Pooh Director Believes Bad Reviews To Be A Part Of Working In Cinema
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was a film that left more than a few viewers stunned. It is safe to say that no one expected Winnie and Piglet to go on a murder spree for two hours in classic slasher-movie style. Due to the extremely unique style, the film received a lot of attention. While audiences enjoyed themselves quite a lot, the same cannot be said about the critics.
The film has a 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the critics did not hold back with their opinions. During an interview with SFX Magazine, the director of the film, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, touched on the subject of the poor rating of his film and how he feels about it.
“It’s a really strange one for me.” Frake-Waterfield told “To be honest, you’ve got to have a really, really thick skin to be a filmmaker because you get heavily, heavily criticized regardless of the means and the resources you have.”
The director stated that he was extremely shocked by how harsh the critics were about his film, however, it did manage to teach him a lesson. He learned that to be a filmmaker in an industry such as this, one must learn to have extremely thick skin.
He believes that any film will be completely ripped to shreds by critics, regardless of what went into making it what it is and how much audiences are enjoying it.
Winnie the Pooh Director Blames Marvel For His Film’s Unfortunate Performance
Rhys Frake-Waterfield then went on to talk about how one of the main criticisms of his film was it looked ‘cheap’. Indeed, many critics complained that the film had a really small budget and it showed in its quality. They added that had the core aspects; like characters, story, and horror as a whole been better, it could have helped the film’s case.
“When your film is out there like that, it literally gets directly compared to Marvel films, even though you’re on 0.01% of their budget. We probably didn’t have their catering budget!” The director continued, “They’re substantially different. But because of the scale Winnie went to, a lot of the critics did almost like-for-like comparisons.”
The director of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey spoke on exactly this, stating that he did not think it fair for critics to compare the visual effects and fighting of his film to the larger-scale productions of Marvel.
The franchise is known for having very high budgets and investing the finest luxuries to make their films into masterpieces. Frake-Waterfield’s film, on the other hand, had a budget of $100,000 and was made over the course of ten days.
