Bambi is ready to take revenge after losing his mother. Upcoming indie-horror film “Bambi: The Reckoning” capitalizes on the devastating Disney animated movie’s backstory — but this Bambi will: F**k. You. Up. The film follows Xana (Roxanne McKee) and her son Benji (Tom Mulheron) who find themselves in a car wreck and are soon hunted down by the vicious killing machine, Bambi.
The teaser was shared with a “Coming Soon” tease from Umbrella Entertainment, the same studio behind viral feature “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.” Directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, that one centers on deranged serial killers Pooh and Piglet who dismember teens on vacation in the Hundred Acre woods.
Umbrella has been opportunistic in its approach to ruining your precious childhood memories (and possibly bringing back those nightmares) with its sicko takes on classic kids IP that recently entered the public domain.
Producer Vince Knight told IndieWire that “Blood and Honey” was funded for only 20,000 British pounds (about $25,000 in the U.S.) and released on VOD and in theaters. “We never really expected it to go to the scale that it ended up going to. I thought there would be a little bit of a market for it and a select group of people would find it just, like, fun,” Knight said.
Bad Winnie the Pooh hit the honeypot with a worldwide box office gross of $5.2 million. A sequel simply titled “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2” was released in February 2024 prior to the making of “Bambi,” also helmed by Frake-Waterfield.
“Yeah, ‘Bambi’ is coming,” he teased at the time. “‘Bambi.’ ‘Pooh 2.’ [But] I’m looking to find other concepts and other retellings which aren’t just IP. Then I’ll see the next one I’m going to get fully attached to. Because even though those projects, ‘Bambi’ and ‘Pooh 2,’ are happening, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll direct them. I may just be involved, and produce them, and get them moving, but there might be one of these other ideas which I think could do incredibly well, and I think I could give a lot to that project and that concept. So I may get drawn to one of them. I’m still in the stages of thinking about that at the moment.”
And there’s not as much risk to adapting the characters — even to the dark side — as you might think.
“If they wanted to, Disney could have shut us down,” Frake-Waterfield said. “Like, the company is so fucking massive, they could have just gone — even if they had no grounds for it — ‘Well, we’re suing you and we’re just gonna throw the book at you. And we’re just gonna tie you up legally. And this will not go out there.’ So there was that, that risk that even if we did everything 100 percent, they could just intentionally be litigators. But they didn’t.”
Check out the teaser for “Bambi: The Reckoning” below.
