10 Most Shockingly Improved Movie Sequels
2. Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & Honey 2
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was about as cynical as movies get - a craven attempt to cash-in on Winnie-the-Pooh entering the public domain, allowing filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield to legally create a low-rent slasher film based on the IP.
Produced for just $50,000, the end result was near-universally panned by critics, landing a mere 3% on Rotten Tomatoes while also going on to win the Worst Picture Razzie Award. Yet, viral marketing and morbid curiosity from the horror crowd led it to gross an undeniably impressive $5.2 million globally - more than 100x its budget - prompting Frake-Waterfield to quickly get to work on a sequel.
To the surprise of just about everybody, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 debuted to surprisingly not-bad reviews, scoring 55% on the Tomatometer, with critics unanimously deeming it a vast improvement over its predecessor.
Frake-Waterfield made shrewd use of his beefed-up $500,000 budget - ten times more than that of the original - to deliver a more professional-looking and gore-filled end product, even if it's still hardly a great movie.
Even so, given that most horror fans simply expected this sequel to be more of the lousy same, in the very least its enterprising filmmaker did his level-best to deliver a bigger, better sequel. A third film is already in development, so it'll be interesting to see whether Frake-Waterfield can level up his work once again.