‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ director wants to make ‘The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ horror film

In case the live of the “Ninja Turtles” that have been released so far don’t seem scary enough, the director of “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” has been keeping an eye on them for a future project. Rhys Frake-Waterfield is the man bent on destroying half the childhood memories of the world and it doesn’t stop with Pooh and his friends. In an interview with Collider, the director fantasized about other characters to which he would have liked to give a gory and bloodthirsty touch and among these, in addition to the mutant turtles, he has included the “adorable” Teletubbies: “I’ve been excited about ‘Ninja Turtles’ lately because I think the story has an inherently creepy backstory. It’s these half-human, half-turtle creatures that live in the sewers and have a rat king following them and then they come out of the sewers with guns. It all starts to connect with me. So I’d love to do that. I’d love to have them in an alley hacking people up, feeding the rat king pizza or something. I hope I can get the copyright, but I can’t I know if I can. I also want to do ‘Teletubbies’.”

Importantly, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” may be filming because the original comics turned 95 in 2021, so the rights to the character have become public knowledge. The same didn’t happen with Tigger, who was only created two years later and therefore doesn’t appear in the film. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made their first appearance in 1984, so to use their likeness, a rights deal would have to be negotiated or wait until the year 2079. In the case of ‘Teletubbies’, the series is British and was first broadcast by the BBC in 1997. In the UK, intellectual property rights for series expire at the age of 50, so in theory, probably they could reach them around 2047.

So far, “Ninja Turtles” has had 8 feature films. In 1990 with ‘Ninja Turtles’, in 1991 with its sequel, ‘Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Green Snots’, and with a third installment of the saga in 1993: ‘Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time’ ; we jump to 2007 with ‘TMNT (Young Mutant Ninja Turtles)’, a digitally and computer-animated film that is a direct sequel to the 1990 one; and in 2009 with the TV Movie ‘Turtles Forever’ also with drawings. An attempt was made in 2014 to revive the franchise with Megan Fox starring and Michael Bay producing and it was simply titled “Ninja Turtles”. Its sequel, from 2016, was titled ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows’ and finally, in 2019, and returning to animation, the mutant reptiles faced Bruce Wayne in ‘Batman vs. The Ninja Turtles’.

Suspended by the critics, scraped by the public

‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ premiered in the United States on February 15 and will arrive in Spain via Vértice 360, although the distributor has not yet set a date. If they were waiting for the first reviews to be wrong, let’s go, because, as expected, the specialized press destroyed it. On Rotten Tomatoes it has a 6% with 33 reviews, which say things like that “a cursed, senseless boredom, and eventually you get depressed because someone spent time working on it” (this one in Rolling Stone). For the New York Times “it’s not funny enough to have anything clever to say about its humor, and it’s not exciting enough to be a competent horror film”; and according to The Wrap, “the film seems half written and the half it gives us is not the right half. Characters and stories appear out of nowhere, disappear into the ether and almost all of them are useless”. They are more benevolent in the AV Club, which at least recognize it “Frake-Waterfield has made sure that what genre fans see is everything they hoped for.”

In the case of the public, as happened to ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’, the average is definitely better, in fact, and even if only slightly, it is also approved. With 54% freshness and over 100 verified user reviews, the public is positive that it is “fun”they consider it a “spiritual successor to ‘Suburban Sasquatch'” is the best: “it falls into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category”.