R-Rated ‘Winnie-The-Pooh’ Series Has Protagonist Getting High To Escape Reality

R-rated Winnie-the-Pooh. Those are some words you never thought would go together until the macabre Blood and Honey film came along. That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that more unseemly facets of Pooh will surface in time. Producers have been able to explore this territory because A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories have entered the public domain, enabling anyone and everyone to reimagine the silly old bear in ways Disney might frown upon.

It now seems that the next on-screen iteration is on the horizon. Variety hears from Toronto-based Boat Rocker Media that the production house is working on the currently-titled Christopher Robin, a hybrid live-action/animation series that’s deceptively not for kids.

This time, instead of centering around Pooh, this new R-rated adaptation mainly follows Christopher Robin, a jaded young New Yorker going through a quarter-life crisis. He does this not with pots of honey but on, er, just pot, prompting something a little different from a sugar high.

Getting baked awakens Christopher to a portal of “weird talking animals” from a land called the Hundred Acres, says the synopsis.

Christopher Robin appears to have a higher budget than the notorious Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Boat Rocker Media is producing the series with Bay Mills Studio, and Shrek 2 co-director Conrad Vernon will be executive producer as well as direct the pilot. The project also brought in Foreign Relations’ Charlie Kesselring to write the script.

The creators tease that the new series will hold on to some familiar aspects of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh yet still be “completely fresh and undeniably funny,” per Bay Mills Studios’ founders Shamier Anderson and Stephan James.

The drug-induced Hundred Acres will conjure up a creative space in which “anything is possible” for the nostalgic icons, they add.

[via IGN and Variety, cover photo © Sergei Nezhinskii | Dreamstime.com]