Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey Is A Box Office Hit Despite Bad Reviews

Budget: < $100,000
Box office: $2.7 million

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Future

In June 2022, Frake-Waterfield expressed interest in a sequel to "ramp it up even more and go even crazier and go even more extreme." In November 2022, he announced that a sequel was in development with Frake-Waterfield returning as director and writer, on a budget "five times" larger than the previous installment. The production is anticipated to meet a February 2024 release.

Alongside the announcement of a sequel, 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 Pan, respectively. In February 2023, Frake-Waterfield announced that the various projects take place in the same shared continuity franchise, while Jagged Edge Productions intends to eventually have crossovers featuring the characters. Frake-Waterfield also expressed interest in making films about Thor, the Norse god of thunder, as well as copyrighted franchises such as the Teletubbies and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Some folks like to say that they don't pay attention to the critics, and they even often do it with a sense of smugness-- as in, "I go my own way, why would I listen to film critics or anyone else, for that matter?!"

But these critics still have jobs, so someone must be reading them . . . I am not too proud to say, that when judging where to spend my finite film-going money when presented with various movies to watch, critical reviews are ONE of many factors I will factor in when deciding on which films to spend my funds.

And in this case, the critics were wrong . . . very wrong, and I am glad I overruled that particular factor when I chose to attend and pay at an actual theater:

The director, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, simply ignored the new rules that have engulfed the film industry over the last ten years or so-- in his casting choices, in his unabashed, unfiltered portrayal of graphic violence, in his dedication to believable practical effects (almost no CGI, though his choices were undoubtedly limited due to the low budget), and creative costume work for Winnie and Piglet. I must say, taking in mind the limited budget, that the prosthetics work when it came to the injuries/deaths suffered by the protagonists was impressive -- better, in my opinion, than many higher budget movies.

I still can't quite decide, however, whether this was a "good" movie-- the acting of almost all the characters was atrociously bad*, and I keep going between a 4 or 5 out of 10 (bad) to as high as a 6 out of 10 (decent to good) for an actual rating; but it might just be that I'm just so blown away by Frake-Waterfield's risk-taking that I'm thinking more highly of this movie than it deserves (the things he did with this project are remarkable now, but wouldn't have been not so long ago).

Trivia:

Possibly giving credence to its limited budget, the hot tub Tik Tok girl I wrote about in another thread for this movie, Lara, played by Natasha Tosini, is shown using a smartphone with a "Natasha" sticker on the back-- which makes me wonder, to save money, if the director had the actress use her own actual phone when filming that scene?!:) Cool on her for agreeing if that is the case.

• With the notable exception of Paula Coiz, who played Christopher Robin's girlfriend, Mary. I thought her acting was superb. But, !!! SPOILER !!! !!! SPOILER !!! unfortunately, her character is gone way too soon.

@wonder2wonder said:

Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey Is A Box Office Hit Despite Bad Reviews

Budget: < $100,000
Box office: $2.7 million

And this is just the beginning. When a movie is made on such a paltry budget, it almost can't help but be profitable. Of course, trying to better understand the relationship, if any, between box office, profit, and quality, was one of the primary drivers for my building my movie ROI database, and I've long since understood that great movies don't always do well financially, and movies that do well financially aren't necessarily great.

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

In June 2022, Frake-Waterfield expressed interest in a sequel to "ramp it up even more and go even crazier and go even more extreme."

I think it's sad that, in this day and age, my reticence at the embrace of violence porn puts me, apparently, in some kind of minority. I just don't find gratuitous disregard for the dignity of life and a human body to be fun to watch.

Years ago, while playing indoor flag football, I went to receive a pass and the ball dislocated my finger. It bent at a gruesome angle, and it was really weird to look at. It, surprisingly didn't hurt, but something had to be done. One of the guys on our team was a doctor, and he recognized it wasn't that big a deal; he told me to brace myself, and then pulled it back into alignment. The noise of the "pop" actually echoed in the gym. A couple of teammates watched the whole procedure and nearly threw up from just that. People were grossed out even though there was no blood. Once it popped back in, my hand was fine, no pain, no lost range of motion, I was in on the next play.

So many people think going to a violent movie is some kind of catharsis when, often, the merest sight of blood IRL makes people sick or queasy. And, if I had a nickel for every bully and tough guy that I, personally, had to straighten out, well, I wouldn't be rich, but I'd have more than a few nickels (I recently was asked to share my skills with a security company and worked the floor at a club, and have had more than my fair share of having to remove people who did not want to leave). Too many people think they're somehow tough or macho for this stuff until sh!t gets real. And I've since discontinued that security work because the risk began to far exceed the reward, and I'm getting too old for that crap.

In November 2022, he announced that a sequel was in development with Frake-Waterfield returning as director and writer, on a budget "five times" larger than the previous installment.

Anyway, while the above are just my own personal subjective opinions, let's get back to my wheelhouse with some cold, hard, numbers. Here's a hallmark driver of why sequels almost never do as well, financially, as the first installment; ballooning budget. According to my movie ROI database with over 2800 titles from 1924 to present, including over 200 franchises tracked therein, the average ROI for a first sequel (2nd installment) is just 35% of the original. If they release a sequel to this, is it going to break that trend? We shall see, but this early indicator is they already seem intent on making the first classic mistake that usually ends in lost profit. Hey, it's not my money, have at it.

Alongside the announcement of a sequel, 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 Pan, respectively. In February 2023, Frake-Waterfield announced that the various projects take place in the same shared continuity franchise, while Jagged Edge Productions intends to eventually have crossovers featuring the characters.

Ah, the MCU-ing of classic Disney movies. I shouldn't be surprised since Disney bought Marvel and developed new Star Wars stories that have been successful. Back to the well, milk that cow...

Mm, is it though? Movies like Gigli and Cool As Ice exist.

@MacArthurParker said:

Mm, is it though? Movies like Gigli and Cool As Ice exist.

Yeah...? Hence "one of", right? There are others (likely including those you mentioned), and WtP:BaH is but one of them.

In an article about Cocaine Bear, the writer made an interesting observation about WtP:BaH:

"In order for that word of mouth to be strong, “Cocaine Bear” must do something that “Violent Night” and “M3GAN” did: make its weird central idea last for 90 minutes. It’s one thing for such a premise to get YouTube and social media engagement from a three-minute trailer, but if early audiences feel like the joke gets old fast, that will dissuade others from spending the time and money to see it in theaters. That is what happened to “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” which made $1.7 million from its limited engagement but got panned by critics and audiences for not doing much with its core idea beyond what was shown in the viral trailer."

Currently, WtP:BaH is tracking at 57% here on TMDb, which is quite low and appears to quantify precisely what the writer suggested.

Let's see if it will rebound with audiences and have some legs in theatres.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

@wonder2wonder said:

Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey Is A Box Office Hit Despite Bad Reviews

Budget: < $100,000
Box office: $2.7 million

let's get back to my wheelhouse with some cold, hard, numbers. Here's a hallmark driver of why sequels almost never do as well, financially, as the first installment; ballooning budget. According to my movie ROI database with over 2800 titles from 1924 to present, including over 200 franchises tracked therein, the average ROI for a first sequel (2nd installment) is just 35% of the original.

So, WtP:BaH paid a delicious $27 revenue for each production budget dollar. Ridiculous!

Hey statisticians and math whizzes, let me digress a bit here to solicit some help, I need suggestions on how to weight movie profitability that factors the variances between a movie's budget vs. the average budget for a release year as well as the movie's revenue vs. the average revenue for the release year. If the average budget is $30 million, and they're all trying to profit, it's kinda cheesy to get a movie into the can for $300,000 (1% of average). Of course, some credit is due if a compelling story can be written and portrayed for that low of a budget, so I'm conflicted about how to weight these discrepancies).

Anyway, a sequel would want to target ROI of $9.45 to meet average, even though they only need $4 to beat the average for all movies.

Regardless the reviews, these numbers are likely to greenlight production.