Frake-Waterfield also credits some of the backlash to the horror genre being historically undervalued and misunderstood. “It doesn’t really score well with critics a lot of the time,” he said. “There are a lot of really great horror films out there, some of the best-known in the genre, and yet they score so badly as films.”
He’s not wrong; horror movies tend to be rated much lower in general by audiences and critics alike. Much of this is just because of the contrasting tastes amongst viewers and how so many horror films intentionally end on a dark note that leaves a bad taste in the audience’s mouths. The 2.9 IMDb rating for the first “Blood and Honey” is still bad even by horror standards, but when you adjust with those biases in mind, it’s probably more in the 3.5-4.5 rating range.
The good news for Frake-Waterfield is that with his new “Winnie-the-Pooh” movie comes a new budget, allowing him to (in theory) make something bigger and better. “Everything has upped its game,” he said, “The story is vastly improved, the performances are far, far better. The look of the creatures, the prosthetics, the gore; that’s all stepped up a significant amount too.” Hopefully, this will lead to a better critical response the second time around. Still, all Frake-Waterfield really cares about is whether audiences stay interested enough to fund a whole trilogy:
“My plan is to let ‘Winnie 2’ go out there, see what the feedback is, what people liked and didn’t like, and then iterate and build on it. As the audience stays there and hopefully expands, and the budgets grow, [the films are] only going to improve further and further as we try and grow this into a really solid franchise.”