In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Rhys Frake-Waterfield’ placed himself in direct competition with the Blumhouse mogul. Per the director:
“I’m hoping that, at minimum, it’s going to have five times the budget of the first one, but it could be substantially more than that as well, which would do absolute wonders for the film. That’s one of the major challenges. It’s competing with films like ‘M3GAN’ [and] they are made on orders of magnitude more. When you have more money for a film, you get more time, you get cooler scenes, you can really spend more time refining things.”
Roger Corman would probably advise the burgeoning schlockmeister to stick to his current practice of producing 14 movies a year. Why spend more money to make your films look respectable when you are hellbent on being disrespectable? Make ’em fast and cheap and short. It’s not like your target audience is paying a great deal of attention anyway. They’re in their phones until someone sheds their clothes and/or gets their throat slashed.
Having perused Frake-Waterfield’s filmography, I would disabuse him of the notion that he can or should play in Jason Blum’s sandbox. He doesn’t have access to world-class talents like Jordan Peele, James Wan, or Leigh Whannel. His competition is The Asylum. Trash like “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” should never be made on a $12 million budget. Go small and vicious, or go home.