Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey Director Reveals Peter Pan Horror Movie Title

After Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey gets its limited theatrical run, filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield will get to work on his previously-teased Peter Pan adaptation, which we now know to be titled Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare. While Frake-Waterfield likely had to work a little bit to make Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet make sense as horror characters, it's fairly built in to Peter Pan -- a story where children are kidnapped off to an alternate dimension at night. No details are available yet on the film, which Frake-Waterfield teased a while back (he didn't yet announce a title then).

The filmmaker is also reportedly working on a movie that toys with the mythology of Thor, the Norse god of thunder, but it seems as though Peter Pan is a litle further along. In all cases, he is taking advantage of properties that have fallen into the public domain, allowing him to use recognizable characters without fear of copyright lawsuits.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is the first major release featuring the characters since Pooh, Piglet, and the other characters from A.A. Milne's original novel were released into the public domain on January 1, 2022. There are some elements, like recognizable designs and wardrobe, that remain under copyright by Disney, and characters introduced later (including Tigger) are not yet in the public domain.

"Pooh and Piglet, they don't have any remorse, and they're actually pretty sadistic," Frake-Waterfield told Dread Central this spring, after stills from the movie went viral. "That was something I wanted from the characters. It's always been just Pooh and Piglet. I've imagined, and got the actors, to portray that Pooh as the alpha of the two. So he's the alpha male over Piglet, and he is always the one in charge of the camp. Piglet essentially is almost a little minion to him, and Piglet just does whatever Pooh wants. And they've built up this over the years. They've built up these really sadistic tendencies amongst themselves. So they used to just go out and just target people to kill them, to eat them as a way of living ... just food basically."

After a certain amount of time, which is different depending on national laws, classic works are considered no longer owned by any one person or entity, and instead become property of the larger culture, allowing them to be adapted, performed, repurposed, or reprinted without any additional cost.  

"Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain – and here we focus on three of the most prominent," the Public Domain Review explained earlier this year. "Newly entering the public domain in 2022 will be: works by people who died in 1951, for countries with a copyright term of "life plus 70 years" (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America); works by people who died in 1971, for countries with a term of "life plus 50 years" (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia); and works published in 1926 (and all pre-1923 sound recordings), for the United States."