Another new year marks another round of classic characters entering the public domain, which means more fuel being added to the fire of the most exhausting pop culture trend in recent history: taking beloved children’s characters and making them the face of a depressingly uncreative slasher film.
Mickey Mouse of Steamboat Willie was the most popular pick this time around, with one hopeful going as far as to put out a trailer for a film called Mickey’s Mouse Trap, a horror-tinged reimagining of Steamboat Willie that could probably make its budget back with a single ticket sale.
But, of all the people to question the laughable crusade for relevance that Mickey’s Mouse Trap is on, Rhys Frake-Waterfield—the hack who had a big hand in this depraved trend in the first place by scheming up Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey—is the last person one would expect to pop up. In an interview with IndieWire, Frake-Waterfield voiced his doubts over whether the team behind Mickey’s Mouse Trap would make something good or not.
Read that again: The guy who made Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is doubtful that Mickey’s Mouse Trap will be any good.
“I don’t know if any of them are going to, you know, try to make them good. That getting repeated all the time, it won’t have the same kind of hit. It doesn’t have the same kind of longevity for what we’re trying to do. I personally believe the only way that this becomes sustainable for us making films is to really focus on doing a select few, the ones we think are best, and making them have a really high quality.”
Rhys Frake-Waterfield to IndieWire
Now, it’s one thing to be blissfully unaware of the irony that one partakes in by saying certain things, but Frake-Waterfield probing the creative intentions of just about anyone’s work blows right past ironic and straight into the question of just how foreign a concept self-awareness is to him. Indeed, after his cinematic transgressions, making a comment like that would require having a brain whose autopilot is on autopilot.
I won’t be defending Mickey’s Mouse Trap or any of the dumpster fires in this vein any time soon, but Frake-Waterfield—whose own pursuits have never suggested any creativity beyond “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny and edgy if this children’s character was a serial killer?”—has absolutely no business questioning the efforts (if you could call them that) of those who will likely be his contemporaries in this cursed sub-genre before long. The sooner this entire trend fizzles into nothing, the better.
(featured image: BritFlicks)
