Passage into public domain means Pooh and Piglet on a murderous rampage in a theatre near you.
To her, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” may not be the most glorious example of the effects of public domain, but it’s part of a process that human creativity depends upon and thrives on. “Blood and Honey” may not make a lasting mark in the Hundred Acre Woods, but something, someday will. 1 column for “Public Domain Day.”](https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/) But nothing has caused her phone to ring off the hook quite like “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.” Time will tell with this movie or any other reuse of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet whether movies like this will be rewarded in the marketplace or have any enduring appeal. “The fact that some people may be disturbed or revolted by this particular re-use of some of the characters from Winnie the Pooh doesn’t detract from the value of the public domain,” says Jenkins. [a professor of law and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain,](https://law.duke.edu/fac/jenkins/) is used to operating in a relatively quiet and byzantine realm of copyright law and thorny rights issues. “When Superman and Batman fall into the public domain, there’s going to be some wild films, I’m sure of it,” says “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” writer, director and co-producer Rhys Waterfield. “Aladdin” comes from the folk tale collection “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.” Though made for less than $100,000, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” will open Friday on some 1,500 screens in North America, an unusually wide release for such a little-funded movie. [“Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud-FBr74K8o) a new microbudget R-rated horror film, Pooh wades into far darker territory than even Eeyore could have ever imagined. Pop culture, as a concept, was born in the 1920s, meaning many of the most indelible — and still very culturally present — works will fall into public domain in the coming years. Tigger, who debuted in 1928’s “The House at Pooh Corner,” isn’t public until 2024.
Which is why Variety sat down with Frake-Waterfield and producer Scott Jeffrey to unpack some of the most WTF moments in the movie. Pooh and Piglet Eat Eeyore.
That’s like the blood and the honey mixing together.” “So you see the car bump over, but you don’t see any of the gore and the effects,” he says. “It’s got antibacterial properties,” the director says. “That’s meant to just give you a little clue,” Frake-Waterfield says. “But I realized in the edit, it was about seven or eight minutes of build up and then when you don’t see anything after it’s a bit of a downer, because you want some sort of payoff. As demonstrated in the scene in which he strings Christopher up by his arms and repeatedly whips him with an instrument that eagle-eyed fans may notice looks uncannily like a donkey’s tail. “I got there, saw the space and then we were like, ‘Okay, we can’t do what I wanted to do,’” he says. And then in VFX just squished it a little bit as the car wheel’s going there.” “I thought it was a nice little link.” As Maria and her friends pitch up in a secluded cottage in the middle of Hundred Acre Wood, audiences know the women are going to be anything but safe. “So I thought, ‘Okay, he needs to die.'” “I knew I was completely fine with killing [Eeyore] because he’s so hard to portray well cinematically,” says Frake-Waterfield.
Originally set for a one-night-only theatrical release, viral hit Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is getting an expanded theatrical release from Fathom.
And will the budget be slashed for Hellboy’s return to the screen, given the character’s not-so-stellar financial track record? But even the Guillermo del Toro movies starring Ron Perlman, though critically acclaimed, never made enough money to warrant more of them. For a complete list of theater locations, visit the Fathom Events website (theaters are subject to change). As time passes, feeling angry and abandoned, the two become feral. What a time to be alive! Will Millennium’s upcoming movie – which hasn’t yet been confirmed by the company, we must note – be aiming for a theatrical release or perhaps a streaming premiere?
English author A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh has appeared in dozens of enchanting and wholesome films and radio adaptations since 1926. Winnie-the-Pooh: ...
And while some horror fans are excited to see Pooh and Piglet turn feral and attack Christopher Robin and his friends, others are apparently upset with director ...
[willing to pay](https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/travel/most-expensive-hotel) upwards of $1,700 a night to stay at Disney World, who knows how far they’d go to defend the integrity of their precious Pooh? “I’ve had petitions to stop it. And while some horror fans are excited to see Pooh and Piglet turn feral and attack Christopher Robin and his friends, others are apparently upset with director Rhys Frake-Waterfield for ruining their childhood favorite.
In addition to pig & bear's new targets, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood & Honey's horror adaptation brings back a few familiar Hundred Acre Woods characters.
The Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey cast member also appeared in The Curse of Humpty Dumpty and Toothfairy 5. [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s pig character](https://screenrant.com/winnie-pooh-blood-honey-characters-confirmed/) in a pool. Massey has been seen in other horror movies such as Bunny the Killer Thing and The Killing Tree. Myers also appeared in the horror movies Vampire Virus, The Candy Witch, and Scarecrow's Revenge. In Blood and Honey](https://screenrant.com/winnie-pooh-horror-movie-peter-pan-perfect-change-miss/), Pooh has grown homicidal and feral after being abandoned by young Christopher Robin. One of Maria’s college friends who visits the Hundred Acre Woods in the 2023 horror movie. Maria’s spectacled friend who is terrorized by Pooh in the gruesome slasher flick. The beloved children’s character is played by Nikolai Leon, whose only acting credit before Blood and Honey was in Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s The Killing Tree. Piglet and Pooh take down any human who comes across their path in the Hundred Acre Woods in Blood & Honey’s terrifying adaptation. [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s horror twist](https://screenrant.com/winnie-pooh-blood-honey-movie-not-disney-rights-explained/), but only Pooh Bear, Piglet, and Christopher Robin appear as main figures. The man inside Pooh Bear’s suit is Craig David Dowsett, whose only other acting credits are Sargent in The Area 51 Incident and Roger the Zombie Easter Bunny in the 2023 movie The House That Zombies Built. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s horrifying adaptation of the beloved children’s story features Craig David Dowsett playing Pooh Bear.
Mickey Mouse could be the next children's character to get the horror treatment after "Steamboat Willie" goes into the pubic domain next year.
A bizarre slasher film has taken advantage of the copyright for A A Milne's classic tale expiring, and reimagined the lovable bear as an axe-wielding ...
When I was making the film I was laughing." Instead of a little red shirt, he wears a lumberjack shirt, a mask bought from eBay, and dishwasher gloves – a costume that was worn by Pooh actor Craig David Dowsett for 12 hour days during the film's intensive 10 day shoot in early 2022. So far, only one of four of A A Milne's Winnie the Pooh books has lapsed into the public domain, 1926's Winnie-the-Pooh, meaning that not all of the characters are yet able to be depicted without legal repercussion. The intention isn't just to steal their copyright and use it for our own purposes. The second, more pressing, issue that loomed over him, though, was the finicky law and copyright surrounding Winnie The Pooh. Then suddenly, if one day that stopped and they got left in the woods, they would become a very different animal. There, he finds his once domesticated friends Winnie the Pooh and Piglet turned feral; scavenging for flesh, blood and drool hanging from their muzzles, ready to go on a killing spree, and ultimately wreak revenge upon Robin for abandoning them all those years ago. If you've got a pet and they become super reliant on you and they love you, you give them food, you shelter them, their life's set, they're expecting that to continue forever. Alongside Scott Jeffrey, a frequent collaborator as well as the film's producer, Waterfield had been "trying to come up with ideas that hadn't been done before", something "extremely different and strange", he tells BBC Culture. In Mexico, where the film received its global premiere on 29 January, the film went to number 4 at the box office in its first week, taking in a reported $700,000. "What fairytales and monsters are there that we can twist in a different direction? 2022's Public Domain Day in the US brought with it a particularly tantalising prospect: AA Milne's Winnie The Pooh was among the works that had reached their 95-year copyright limit, meaning that the butterball bear could henceforth be used and depicted by anyone – and in any way they wanted.
Rhys Frake-Waterfield's horror film might ruin your childhood, but it's a win for creative freedom.
And in 2006, Disney stepped in to prevent a stonemason from carving Winnie the Pooh into a child’s tombstone. In the United States, [such protections](https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-bill/505) can last nearly a century. [asked](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/taylor-swift-shakes-copyright-lawsuit-1084373/) to contemplate whether the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” (“The players gonna play, play, play, play, play / And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate”) bear an unseemly resemblance to words form a lesser-known song by the girl group 3LW (“Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate”). If artists appropriate the Steamboat-era Mickey—a figure with a rat nose and pupil-less eyes, who’s less cute than the Mickey of Fantasia or The Prince and the Pauper—will Disney sue for trademark infringement or say that the act violated existing copyright protections? In America, copyright protections could serve the interests of capitalism; their expiration could serve the interests of democracy. It’s a basic tenet of American (that is, Hamiltonian) capitalism that, to have a dynamic country, you need economic incentives (and therefore [protections](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3362940) for intellectual property). The [film](https://thewalrus.ca/tag/film/) is called [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-IFS_upGGU), and it’s a slasher. [crafted ](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2010/04/08/copyright-and-wrong)the world’s first copyright statute between 1709 and 1710, it was trying to reconcile competing interests: the interests of writers, printers, and publishers, who, in order to monetize their works, needed some form of legally protected ownership, and the interests of the public, which benefited from access to information and culture. (The same copyright [expired in Canada](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/trump-supporters-prep-for-2024-bye-bye-blackberry-don-t-look-up-why-we-procrastinate-joygerm-day-and-more-1.6307339/how-winnie-the-pooh-highlights-flaws-in-u-s-copyright-law-and-what-that-could-mean-for-canada-1.6309960) back in 2007.) But one doesn’t have to like this film to appreciate what it does—the way it makes space for a certain kind of uninhibited creative freedom, which has long been imperilled in our culture and is still imperilled today. [pretty much](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-01-03/winnie-the-pooh-public-domain) [everything](https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/01/08/winnie-pooh-public-domain/) in Milne’s first Pooh collection—the characters, the stories, the line drawings by E. In short order, the genre became consumed by the quest for novelty, with producers dreaming up new gimmicks—a killer in a hockey mask, a killer in a slicker, a killer disguised as a wax dummy—and then finding ever-more-garish ways to brutalize victims.
Passage into public domain means Pooh and Piglet on a murderous rampage in a theatre near you.
To her, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” may not be the most glorious example of the effects of public domain, but it’s part of a process that human creativity depends upon and thrives on. “Blood and Honey” may not make a lasting mark in the Hundred Acre Woods, but something, someday will. 1 column for “Public Domain Day.”](https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/) But nothing has caused her phone to ring off the hook quite like “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.” Time will tell with this movie or any other reuse of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet whether movies like this will be rewarded in the marketplace or have any enduring appeal. “The fact that some people may be disturbed or revolted by this particular re-use of some of the characters from Winnie the Pooh doesn’t detract from the value of the public domain,” says Jenkins. [a professor of law and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain,](https://law.duke.edu/fac/jenkins/) is used to operating in a relatively quiet and byzantine realm of copyright law and thorny rights issues. “When Superman and Batman fall into the public domain, there’s going to be some wild films, I’m sure of it,” says “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” writer, director and co-producer Rhys Waterfield. “Aladdin” comes from the folk tale collection “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.” Though made for less than $100,000, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” will open Friday on some 1,500 screens in North America, an unusually wide release for such a little-funded movie. [“Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud-FBr74K8o) a new microbudget R-rated horror film, Pooh wades into far darker territory than even Eeyore could have ever imagined. Pop culture, as a concept, was born in the 1920s, meaning many of the most indelible — and still very culturally present — works will fall into public domain in the coming years. Tigger, who debuted in 1928’s “The House at Pooh Corner,” isn’t public until 2024.
When the first stills from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey landed online in May of last year, the co-production from prolific genre film producers Jagged ...
There are bits intended to be funny and intended to be a bit campy. Hopefully, if it’s successful, and it does well, then we could do more and we will have the potential to do those sort of routes in the future. It’s got a dramatic undertone to it and it’s very serious. Even though there’s a lot of interest out there, we need to make sure everyone’s aware, February 15th is the day to go and see it in your cinema. The film is made for horror fans, so I’m hoping they’re the audience which are going to enjoy it the most. They’ve got the trailer playing before a lot of films in the cinema like M3GAN, Knock at the Cabin, things like that, to try and draw in those sorts of audiences. Over the years, people have altered and removed the darkness out of it, and brought it into more of a child-friendly version. as it has in Mexico and the rest of the world. They love Winnie-the-Pooh and horror, so they took it and agreed to do a full theatrical release in South and Central, then North America did initially a one day event, but now they’ve expanded it to a nine day event. I’m part of Jagged Edge—we were the filmmakers—so it’s our responsibility to say, ‘We think we should do this idea. There’s a lot of goodwill for the film. A frenzy of media coverage followed for the indie-budget viral sensation, which sets a feral Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet out on a bloody rampage.