Now that Pooh: Blood & Honey is slashing it up in theatres, director Rhys Frake-Waterfield has spoken previously about his desire to keep the “kids characters as slasher villains” train a-going. Along with producing a horror flick focused on Bambi that’s currently in production and cooking up ideas for a Peter Pan film, Frake-Waterfield’s also got a desire to bring in kids properties outside of those commonly associated with Disney.
Speaking with Collider, Frake-Waterfield was asked about what properties he’d be interested in working on. The answers were Teletubbies and Ninja Turtles, of all things. Though this was intended as a fun thought exercise, he had some specifics on what he’d do with the Turtles, which he said had a “horrifying undertone” due to their whole concept of being mutant turtles raised by a talking rat man. “I’d love to have them like down an alleyway cutting people up, feeding them to their rat king on pizza or something,” he said. “It all just starts to link together to me, so I’d love to do that.”
Copyrights prevent Frake-Waterfield from getting his hands on either the Teletubbies or Turtles, both of which currently or will soon have new versions start up fairly soon. But what he will be able to make is a Pooh sequel, since the movie has already earned $US2 ($3) million at the box office thanks to its January release in Mexico and current theatrical run in the US. He and the rest of Jagged Edge are already cooking up a sequel, and one that’ll have a much larger budget than the $US100,000 ($138,820) of the first film.
“I’m hoping that, at minimum, it’s going to have five times the budget of the first one,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “But it could be substantially more than that as well. […] When you have more money for a film, you get more time, you get cooler scenes, you can really spend more time refining things.” However, he admitted to wanting to pursue other projects beyond grisly IP fare, and said that may keep him from directing Pooh 2. “I may just be involved, and produce them, and get them moving…I’m still in the stages of thinking about that at the moment.”