Winnie-the-PoohThere's nothing wonderful about Tigger in sequel to viral

A couple of years back, British filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield learned that the 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh — which introduced the characters Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and Christopher Robin — was about to fall into the public domain and decided to direct a horror film featuring the quartet. The low-budget result, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, became a viral sensation after stills from the film hit the internet in May 2022.

At the time he was making the film, Frake-Waterfield was unable to feature the character of Tigger, who first appeared in 1928's The House at Pooh Corner and had not yet bounced into the public domain. Pooh's tiger buddy does, however, feature in the director's sequel, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, as you can see in the frightening first-look images of the horror franchise's version of Tigger.

In the film, Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Owl, and Tigger find their woodland home and their lives endangered after Christopher Robin reveals their existence. Not wanting to live in the shadows any longer, the group decides to take the fight to the town of Ashdown, leaving a bloody trail of death and mayhem in their wake.

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Speaking about the sequel back in 2023, Frake-Waterfield told EW, "I'm hoping that, at minimum, it's going to have five times the budget of the first one, but it could be substantially more than that as well, which would do absolute wonders for the film. That's one of the major challenges. It's competing with films like M3GAN [and] they are made on orders of magnitude more. When you have more money for a film, you get more time, you get cooler scenes, you can really spend more time refining things. So I'm really excited for what the second film's going to do."

The cast of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 includes Scott Chambers, Eddy Mackenzie, Marcus Massey, Tallulah Evans, Kelly Rian Sanson, and Simon Callow from Four Weddings and a Funeral. The film's release date has yet to be announced.

Frake-Waterfield recalled to EW in a previous interview how the first entry went viral overnight, just based on early imagery released for the film. "I got woken up about 4 a.m. by the other co-producer. He was like, 'Look at your phone!' Endless stories had been posted about it," the filmmaker said.

When IMDb released a list of 2023's most-anticipated films, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey placed second, below Barbie but above Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, and The Little Mermaid. In January 2023, the movie premiered in Mexico, where the film cracked the box-office top five, and the following month the movie played in nearly 1,500 theaters in the U.S.

Watch the trailer for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 below.

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