Winnie the Pooh today, Bambi and Peter Pan tomorrow? When the kind heroes of our childhood fall into the public domain, their lives can turn into a nightmare. Imagine the bear cub and his friend Piglet transformed into sinister characters prowling in the dark behind a young woman lying quietly in a jacuzzi…
Barely broadcast, these images, taken from the film “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” (Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey) ignited the Web. Winnie as a bloodthirsty killer? How did we get here ? Quite simply because the first “Winnie the Pooh” books, published in 1926, have recently fallen into the public domain. Concretely, whoever wants can use the plantigrade in new adventures, even very far from his domain of origin.
But as the Disney giant holds the license for the bear cub, the British director Rhys Frake-Waterfield took care to imagine a character very far from the one exploited by the American entertainment giant. The license held by Disney, renewable indefinitely, prohibits anyone from releasing a product related to Winnie and which could be confused with the original…
Big, menacing, scary…
The filmmaker has therefore made the cute little beast, imagined in the last century by Alan Alexander Milne, a bloodthirsty killer in a film released on January 26 in Mexico, where he is a hit. The story ? Abandoned by their human friend Jean-Christophe, now an adult, Winnie and Piglet are left to fend for themselves. Returned to the wild state, they embark on a murderous madness. Having become sadistic and terrifying, they scour the surroundings in search of new victims… We discover a Winnie “tall, threatening, frightening, intimidating and horrifying and above all not small, cuddly and cute. »
Still, this bloody reinvention of the nice hero has ulcerated more than one fan. ” This is madness. I received petitions to stop it. I received death threats. I’ve had people tell me they’ve called the police,” Rhys Frake-Waterfield said.
A controversy which this small film with a very light budget has taken advantage of to afford fairly crazy media coverage at a lower cost. While it only comes out on Wednesday in the United States, it has already raised more than 2 million dollars in revenue in two weeks, for an investment of 250,000 dollars. According to experts in the 7th Art, it could become one of the most profitable films in the history of cinema.
Already a sequel with “more blood and more honey”
Its director hopes to dethrone the horror film “Paranormal Activity”, released in 2009 thanks to an investment of 15,000 dollars, and which launched a saga capable of garnering more than a billion box office receipts. But according to an AFP journalist who saw the film in Mexico City, many viewers came out unhappy with the screening.
This does not seem to affect its director, who is already preparing a sequel with “more blood and more honey”. According to the professional magazine “Livres Hebdo”, Hollywood intends to rush into this new vein. The British director Scott Jeffrey, specialist in horror, would work on the rereadings of two heroes of youth. In “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare”, the Island of the Lost Children would turn into crime and, in “Bambi: The Reckoning”, he imagines a new story of the rather gory orphaned fawn.