Why You Should Watch Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (Even if You Didn’t See the First One)

It didn’t take long after the characters from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories entered the public domain for there to be a very low-budget, very highly criticized horror movie featuring those lovable animals as cold-blooded killers. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey made a lot of waves in 2023 and, against all odds, turned a modest budget into a major profit. Both audiences and critics have agreed the film is pretty terrible, but director Rhys Frake-Waterfield and the folks at Jagged Edge Productions did something surprising with the budding franchise after raking in some money — They made it better.

Earlier this year, Jagged Edge released Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 into theaters for just a couple of nights. The reactions from those that saw it were completely different from the conversations leaving theaters after the first Blood and Honey. This is a rare situation where a bad movie got a good sequel, and it’s one that should get your attention now that it’s readily available to watch.

Blood and Honey 2, giving horror fans the chance to stream it on a service for the first time. As many will discover in the coming weeks, this sequel isn’t just a better movie than its predecessor, it feels like something entirely different. It’s like Frake-Waterfield and the creative team took the criticisms about the first movie on the chin, learned from their experiences, and set out to make something more inventive and all-around better with the sequel. This is a movie worth checking out if you have any interest in these “kids character-turned-slasher villain” movies. If you haven’t seen the first one, that’s okay; you don’t need to.

WARNING: The rest of this article contains spoilers from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey! Continue reading at your own risk…

The secret to the Blood and Honey 2 is that, while it doesn’t exactly erase what happened in the first movie, it gives it a completely different context. It’s revealed at the start of the sequel that the first , taking a real massacre and using what Christopher Robin said about Pooh and his friends as inspiration for the killers. Most people in the world of this film don’t believe Christopher when he talks about the terrors of the 100 Acre Wood, and the movie that was made has people thinking he’s even more ridiculous.

So the first movie is simply a fictional retelling of events that takes place within the universe of the second movie. That removes any need for the events of the first movie to be accurate, in addition to offering some freedom for the looks of characters like Pooh and Piglet. When they look different than they did the first time around, it’s simply because that first time was a fictionalized version of the “actual” events.

This little maneuver not only gives the creative team more freedom in Blood and Honey 2, it also wipes the slate clean for newcomers who want to dive into this budding franchise. If you’ve heard only terrible things about the first Blood and Honey but want to give the much more highly regarded sequel a chance, you can totally do that. You literally won’t miss a thing if you jump in with Blood and Honey 2.

And this is a good time to jump in, because Jagged Edge has a few more movies lined up in the Twisted Childhood Universe. There are currently horror versions of Bambi, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio lined up, as well as a monsters team-up movie that will feature the return of the Winnie-the-Pooh characters.

Both of the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey movies are now streaming on Peacock.