Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey director Rhys Frake-Waterfield has already made it clear that he has plenty of other public domain works in his sights for a horror make-over. However, there is another franchise he would love to give the slasher treatment in the form of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While it seems that his immediate attention is set on a sequel to Blood and Honey, as well as other children’s stories such as Bambi and Peter Pan, the filmmaker recently told Collider that he would love to get his hands on the rights to the heroes in a half-shell. He said:
"I've really been excited by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lately, because I think the story has a very kind of horrifying undertone anyway because it's these half-human, half-turtles who live in the sewer who have a rat king who they follow, and then they come out of the sewer with weapons. [Laughs] It all just starts to link together to me. So I'd love to do that. I'd love to have them like down an alleyway cutting people up, feeding them to their rat king on pizza or something. I hope I can get the copyrights to that, but I don't know if I can."
Of course, as he notes, the rights to the Ninja Turtles franchise would be a little bit trickier to plunder than the likes of Winnie the Pooh, which entered the public domain last year. The Ninja Turtles are both an ongoing concern as comics, with The Last Ronin 2 having been recently announced, and as a film franchise, with various iterations already in development. It is unlikely that any of the rights holders would be keen on lending the franchise to a dark, gory horror movie.
Is Blood and Honey’s Director Building an 'Anti-Disney' Universe?
While Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has had to skirt around a number of Disney owned aspects of the characters of A.A. Milne, Frake-Waterfield has made it obvious that he is building something of a dark Disney-opposing universe with the future projects he has in mind. Who knows, with the copyright status of Mickey Mouse himself being on ropey ground recently, it could only be a matter of time before we see a bloodthirsty rodent rampaging across a deserted Disneyland car lot.
For now though, the focus is on old fairy stories and urban legends that have mostly been made light and fluffy by the House of Mouse. While this may seem like the creation of a universe that is directly against Disney’s movies, it isn’t quite like that. Frake-Waterfield previously explained:
"The idea is that we’re going to try and imagine they’re all in the same world, so we can have crossovers. People have been messaging saying they really want to see Bambi versus Pooh. There are many, many, many other ideas out there which aren’t tied to Disney, loads of old fairytales and urban legends, concepts that are synonymous with your childhood, and they’re the ones which I want to build up into a twisted alternative reality."
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is in cinemas now.