Following the commercial success of Blood and Honey, director Frake-Waterfield expressed interest in a sequel that was greenlit in November 2022. The film utilizes metafictional and film within a film elements as Chambers, Oliva, and Eddy McKenzie replace original cast members Nikolai Leon, Craig David Dowsett, and Chris Cordell in the roles of Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Piglet, respectively.[b]
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 premiered in London on 18 March 2024, and was theatrically released in the United States on 26 March 2024. It received negative reviews from critics and grossed $7.5 million worldwide on a budget of $500,000. A sequel, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 3, is scheduled to be released in 2026.
Plot
After narrowly surviving Winnie-the-Pooh's and Piglet's killing spree,[c]Christopher Robin flees from the Hundred Acre Wood and returns to his childhood town of Ashdown to seek help; the corpses of Maria and her friends are recovered from the woods, but Christopher is believed to be responsible.
The incident is dubbed the "Hundred Acre Massacre", and a film adaptation based on the murders is released, damaging Christopher's reputation in Ashdown.[b] Only a few people believe Christopher's story, including his childhood friends Lexy, Finn, and Aaron, his parents Alan and Daphne, and his younger sister Bunny. Now an outcast, Christopher has nightmares about Pooh and goes to his hypnotherapistMary Darling to deal with a trauma in which his twin brother Billy was kidnapped many years ago during their birthday party, and never seen again.
Meanwhile, in the Hundred Acre Wood, Pooh and Piglet are forced to hide with fellow creatures Tigger and Owl when their home is burned down. After they slaughter three university students in a recreational vehicle, Owl tries to convince Pooh to attack Ashdown instead of waiting for more people to come to the woods. Some hunters, led by Aaron, ambush the creatures and shoot Piglet in the head as revenge for deaths of Maria’s group. Pooh murders them in retaliation and reconsiders Owl's proposal, but Aaron survives and returns to Ashdown.
Due to the town's negative backlash, Christopher loses his job as a doctor and returns with Mary to undergo further hypnotherapy. When Aaron arrives at the local hospital for treatment, Christopher suspects the attack was done by Pooh, which is confirmed when he asks Aaron what happened. He also encounters hospital janitor Cavendish, whom he recognises as the man who kidnapped Billy, and confronts him in his house. Cavendish reveals that he worked for Dr. Arthur Gallup, a scientist who employed him to kidnap children—among them Billy—around Ashdown for experiments with animal genes in exchange for settling his debts. The children became animal-human hybrids with enhanced healing factors, whom Gallup killed and buried in the Hundred Acre Wood. Cavendish subsequently murdered Gallup and learnt the children resurrected and dug themselves out of their graves. Cavendish burns the last evidence linking him to Gallup and commits suicide out of guilt.
As night falls, Pooh, Tigger, and Owl embark on a rampage throughout Ashdown and murder several residents on the way, including Finn. Pooh personally murders Alan and Daphne and attacks Lexy while she is babysitting, but she survives the ordeal. The creatures then arrive at a rave party in an abandoned warehouse and slaughter all the partygoers. Christopher rushes to the warehouse, where he shoots Tigger, and learns Bunny was kidnapped. He returns to the Hundred Acre Wood and fights Pooh, who easily subdues him as they stumble across Billy's own grave. Christopher calls Pooh—revealed to be Billy—by his real name. Lexy intervenes and stalls Pooh long enough for Christopher to kill him with an axe. Video footage of Pooh is passed to the police, who found Bunny in her room unharmed, and Christopher is subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing. Christopher and Bunny are reunited and escorted home by the police.
In a mid-credits scene, Owl and Tigger, having survived, recover the corpses of Pooh and Piglet, the latter whose head starts to regenerate, with Owl promising to find a way to bring them back and that they will get their revenge on Christopher, once and for all.
Additionally, Nikolai Leon, Craig David Dowsett and Chris Cordell appear as Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, respectively, in archival footage from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. Cameo appearances of Bambi, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, a Heffalump and Rabbit are made in drawings during the end credits.
Production
Development and writing
In a June 2022 interview with Josh Korngut of Dread Central, director Rhys Frake-Waterfield expressed interest in creating a sequel to Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and stated that he wants to "ramp it up even more and go even crazier and go even more extreme".[8] In November 2022, he announced that a sequel, currently titled Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, was in development, with him returning as director. In September 2023, teaser images were released showing the addition of character Owl, who only appeared in the first movie's prologue.[9] The film features a new cast and new character designs, and takes place in the town of Ashdown rather than the Hundred Acre Wood.[10] Additionally, the character Tigger, who was absent from the first film, appears since going in the public domain in January 2024.[5][11] In 2023, it was revealed that Frake-Waterfield intended to have Pooh wield a chainsaw as a weapon in the film,[12] and that the film would feature over thirty deaths.[13]
The film's screenplay was written by Matt Leslie.[11] Rhys Frake-Waterfield spent time gathering fan feedback, such as putting out a poll on Instagram asking what the audience wanted to see in the film. Among the audience's requests was the inclusion of Poohsticks, in which Winnie-the-Pooh and Owl can be seen playing a twisted version of at one point in the film.[14] While a large portion of his audience requested the traditional woodland setting in the Hundred Acre Wood, some requested a small town setting, which led Rhys to decide to do a mix of both. After two months of collecting information, Rhys Frake-Waterfield and Matt Leslie created a very detailed 20-page script treatment full of ideas and scenes they wanted in the film, such as the idea of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends being human children who were kidnapped and experimented on by a mad scientist, among them the twin brother of Christopher Robin.[15] Despite the similarities, the idea was not taken from Five Nights at Freddy's (which released in October 2023, a month after principal photography concluded). When watching the film in cinemas, Rhys grew concerned upon learning of the backstories involving a missing brother and children becoming animatronic characters and messaged Matt, saying he was worried that they would take the same direction they had chosen. To his relief, however, the backstories of the characters in that film went down a more supernatural route.[15] The film took inspiration from Terrifier 2.[16] The decision was also made to retcon the first film into a film within a film, meaning that while the events of the first film happened in-universe, the film is intended to be an adaptation based on the events entitled Honey and Blood: The Christopher Robin Story, explaning the redesigns for Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet. By June 2023, the script was completed.
Casting
By September 2023, Scott Chambers, Ryan Oliva, Talluah Evans, Peter DeSouza Feighoney and Simon Callow were reported to have been cast in the film.[9] Scott, Ryan and Eddy MacKenzie took over the roles of Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet from Nikolai Leon, Craig David Dowsett and Chris Cordell, respectively. When recasting Christopher Robin, Rhys Frake-Waterfield requested Scott for the role. Scott was hesitant to portray the role, due to the amount of negative backlash they had received from the first film (with Rhys being the main target), as well as him working as producer, but accepted Rhys's request.[14]
In July 2023, Lewis Santer was cast as Tigger.[14] For a month, before filming began, Lewis watched two to three horror films a night and made notes to see what frightened him as an actor, then put it into the character. Among these films were A Nightmare on Elm Street, It and Terrifier, as his version of Tigger was inspired by a combination of Freddy Krueger, Pennywise and Art the Clown. An element Lewis found amongst these three characters that frightened him was that they would often move slow at first, then spring into frantic movement when someone least expected it. Additionally, Lewis would often spend time in his kitchen recording himself practice crawling on his arms and legs very early in the morning.[14] An additional element played into the character is that because Tigger has been locked up by the others for so long due to being the most dangerous of the group, by the time he finally escapes, his mental state has deteriorated, so the crew requested Lewis to act as if he had drank "twenty Red Bulls".
Scott previously worked with Teresa Banham and Simon Callow in acting roles in projects such as Malpractice and Doctor Jekyll, respectively. When casting Banhem as Mary Darling, Christopher Robin's hypnotherapist, he informed her that although her role in the film was small, he promised a larger role in The Twisted Childhood Universe moving on. Scott believed that Callow would be perfect for the role of Mark Cavendish, a hospital janitor who is revealed to have a dark connection with Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends. To his delight, Callow kindly agreed to portray the role.[17][18]
Filming
Principal photography began and concluded in September 2023.[19] Out of all the scenes to film, the rave party was the most difficult to film. Rhys Frake-Waterfield and Scott Chambers had grown excited over working on a larger budget, and they believed they could do anything. Three days before principal photography began, the costume designer/production designer pulled out, which led Scott to order the raver costumes online. This in turn was quite difficult, as Scott barely knew anything about the female body, and many of the extras for the rave had different breast and waist sizes. In fact, the rave party scene was so intense, Rhys threw up on set out of stress.[20][21]
The film was originally reported to have a budget five times larger than its predecessor;[22] it would later be confirmed that the budget had increased to ten times larger than the first film.[13] Shaune Harrison, who previously worked on productions such as World War Z, the Harry Potter franchise, and Game of Thrones, was the film's creature and gore designer, while Paula Anne Booker led the special effects.[10] Winnie-the-Pooh's prosthetics in the film cost over $20,000 compared to the $770 spent on the first film's costume.[19]
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 grossed $533,144 in the United States and Canada, and over $7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $7.6 million.[26]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 47% of 43 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.6/10.The website's consensus reads: "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 represents an improvement over the original in most respects, although the Poohniverse remains a place made for hardcore slasher fans."[27]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 27 out of 100, based on nine critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.[28]
Luke Thompson of The A.V. Club gave the film a positive review, writing "This is cinema at its most punk rock—a raucous, unpolished, cheap, sacred-cow shredding middle finger to the mainstream with just enough raw talent inside to keep it from being dismissable."[29]IGN's Matt Donato gave it a score of 6/10, comparing its approach to that of Terrifier 2 and writing, "It boasts a nastier midnight-movie appeal, radical practical effects, and a brisk 90-minute runtime. It's a shaky first step for Frake-Waterfield's proposed 'Poohniverse' concept – but it's a step in the right direction."[30]
Owen Gleiberman of Variety gave the film a negative review, criticizing the screenplay and direction. He concluded his review by writing, "Somewhere up in drive-in-theater heaven, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ed Wood are smiling, even if Frake-Waterfield makes them look like Scorsese and Spielberg."[31]The Daily Beast's Nick Schager said the film "boasts a bigger budget, higher production values, and an entirely new cast. Alas, when it comes to the things that matter most—like writing, directing, and acting—it's as chintzy and inept as its predecessor."[32]
Future
Sequel
On 28 March 2024, two days after the film's release, it was announced that a third film was being developed.[33] By August 2025, it was reported that Chambers would direct the film, from a screenplay by Richard Stanley.[34]Principal photography is set to commence in early 2026.[34]
Spin-off
In March 2024, in an interview with Jonathan Fuge of MovieWeb, Lewis Santer spoke of a potential spin-off film centred around the character Tigger.[35]
In January 2025, franchise producer Scott Chambers announced as part of the studio's second phase of movies, a spin-off of the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey movies centered around Tigger, entitled Tigger's Return. The project will enter production following the release of Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble. The producer explained the audience's reception to the character as the reason the character receiving his own installment.[36]
In November 2022, two other horror films were announced: Bambi: The Reckoning and Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare based on Bambi, a Life in the Woods and Peter and Wendy, respectively.[37][38][39] In February 2023, Frake-Waterfield announced that the various projects take place in The Twisted Childhood Universe, sharing continuity as a franchise. The filmmaker further stated that Jagged Edge Productions intends to eventually have crossovers featuring all of the characters.[40] In January 2024, a third film, Pinocchio: Unstrung, based on The Adventures of Pinocchio, was announced as part of the TCU.[41]Pinocchio: Unstrung was referenced at the end of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2; while other teases to the expanded universe and future projects were displayed through drawings during the end credits.[42][43]
1 2 Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) is presented as a film adaptation based on the "Hundred Acre Massacre" that took place before the events of Blood and Honey 2. Although the events of Blood and Honey actually happened in-universe, it is presented as a film within a film, which explains the redesigns for Christopher, Pooh, and Piglet.
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