Public domain Pooh is back in the trailer for Blood And Honey 2

On January 1 of this year, Winnie-The-Pooh supporting character Tigger joined his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood in the public domain, meaning modern creators can now freely use the character to make whatever kinds of interesting art they want to without having to worry about the A.A. Milne estate coming after them. It also means, for better or worse, that filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield can now make a sequel to last year’s Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey with Tigger in it. And that’s… good? Good for everyone who made the first one, at least.

Blood And Honey 2, which has a whole new cast and significantly more elaborate creature prosthetics, is about the demonic Pooh and his furry friends going on a violent rampage outside of the Hundred Acre Wood to get revenge on Christopher Robin after the events of the first movie—which mostly involved Pooh and Piglet murdering people, and they seem to enjoy that, so we don’t understand why they’re so angry. This trailer features some gnarly kills and a shot of evil Tigger, but mostly it seems to be making a noble effort to sustain The Joke from the first movie. In other words, it has more of “what if Winnie-The-Pooh killed people?”, and that’s really all it needs.

Now, one could once again point at that these movies could be considered parody, and therefore might’ve been allowed to exist even before Winnie-The-Pooh entered the public domain, but, if nothing else, it must be a lot easier to make something like this now than it would’ve been a few years ago. If filmmakers really wanted to start having fun with this stuff, though, they would just put Pooh and the other characters into movies that played it totally straight, like if a rom-com had that cliché scene where the guy gets bad advice from his friends but one of them just happens to be Tigger.