By Pierre Lorenz on November 29, 2022 at 09:22 am

With "Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey" and "Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare", two dark and bizarre spin-offs of well-known Disney characters will be released next year. In both cases, these are horror flicks that have nothing to do with their original characters and are completely separate. Moreover, as a family-friendly corporation, Disney is not involved in them. However, how can it be that outside filmmakers simply use some of the most famous cartoon characters without being hit by copyright lawsuits from Disney? The reality is that the copyrights to the respective book originals have expired, which in turn means that anyone can adapt the world-famous characters without needing to pay for a license. This is not to be confused with Disney's films, which have a particular style of their own and are unrelated, so you cannot just adapt Winnie-the-Pooh from the Disney productions, but have to refer to the book original, so to speak.

In addition to Peter Pan and Winnie-the-Pooh, another equally innocent character is now waiting for its horror makeover, namely Bambi. The upcoming movie is also to be produced by Scott Jeffrey, who is already involved in the aforementioned Winnie-the-Pooh movie. As the maker himself revealed to Dread Central, "Bambi" will be an incredibly dark retelling of the 1928 story, with the sweet fawn becoming a merciless killing machine. The movie is said to be inspired by "The Ritual", a horror flick in which a deer-like creature also wreaks havoc.