Beloved children's characters Winnie the Pooh and Piglet are about to undergo a dramatic makeover in the slasher horror film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.
The latest retelling of the iconic characters will see Pooh and Piglet abandoned by Christopher Robin, leading to the pair becoming "the main villains…going on a rampage."
Despite the film still being in production, the response online has already been "absolutely crazy," said writer and director Rhys Waterfield in an interview with Variety.
Describing the premise of Blood and Honey, Waterfield said: "Christopher Robin has pulled away from them, and he's not [given] them food; it's made Pooh and Piglet's life quite difficult."
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"Because they've had to fend for themselves so much, they've essentially become feral," he continued.
"So they've gone back to their animal roots. They're no longer tame: they're like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey."
Despite A.A. Milne's two original characters and earlier stories now being out of copyright, Waterfield is aware that Disney also owns exclusive use of their characters' interpretations. "We've tried to be extremely careful," he explained.
"We knew there was this line between that, and we knew what their copyright was and what they've done. So we did as much as we could to make sure [the film] was only based on the 1926 version of it.
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"No one is going to mistake this [for Disney]. When you see the cover for this and you see the trailers and the stills and all that, there's no way anyone is going to think this is a child's version of it."
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was shot over ten days not far from Ashdown Forest in England, the location which inspired Milne's original stories. The film is yet to receive a release date but will be distributed by ITN Studios.
"Because of all the press and stuff, we're just going to start expediting the edit and getting it through post production as fast as we can," Waterfield added.
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