LOS ANGELES – The giant teddy bear, with a crooked smile on his face, walks across the screen. The ominous music increases. Shadows mask unknown threats. Christopher Robin begs for his life. And is that a sledgehammer about to pulverize a secondary character’s head?
So unfolds the trailer for the 2023 film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” a horror movie riff on AA Milne’s beloved characters, brought to you by… the expiration of copyright and the arrival of the classic children’s novel in the American Public Domain.
We already lived in an era full of remixes and reuse, fan fictions and mashups. Then began a parade of characters and stories, led by Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse, with many more to follow, marching into the public domain, where anyone can do anything with anything and turn it into a new generation of stories and stories. ideas.
After a two-decade drought brought on by copyright period extensions by Congress in 1998, works began to enter the public domain again – becoming available for use without licensing or payment – in 2019. The public began to notice in 2022 , when Winnie the Pooh was released for use while the 95-year copyright period of the novel that featured it elapsed.
That made “Blood and Honey” possible — not to mention a sequel released last month, an upcoming third and plans for a “Poohniverse” of twisted public domain characters, including Bambi and Pinocchio. Pooh’s IPO was followed this year by a moment many thought would never come: the expiration of the copyright on the original version of Mickey Mouse as he appeared in Walt Disney’s 1928 short “Steamboat Willie.”
The mouse and the bear are just the beginning. The peak of 20th century pop culture – Superman among them – is yet to come.
Classic characters, new stories, new mashups. Will it all be a bonanza for manufacturers? Are we entering a heyday of intergenerational collaboration or a precipitous drop in intellectual property values as the public tires of seeing variations on the same old stories?
Does a murderous Pooh bear have something to show the world of 21st century entertainment?
Films from the early talkie era of Hollywood began to become public. King Kong, which already has one of its enormous feet in the public domain because of complications between companies that own a piece of it, will throw off its remaining chains in 2029. Then, in the 2030s, Superman will fly into the public domain, followed by in quick succession by Batman, the Joker and Wonder Woman.
The possibility of new stories is vast. As well as the possibility of repetition. Classic stories and characters can be a little tiring.
“I don’t think it’s going to make that much of a difference,” says Phil Johnston, the Oscar nominee who co-wrote Disney’s 2011 “Wreck-It Ralph” and co-wrote and co-directed its sequel, 2018’s “Ralph.” . Break the Internet.”
“Like, ‘Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey’ was a new thing, it made a bit of a splash, I think. But if someone turns ‘Steamboat Willie’ into a jet ski movie or something, who cares?” he says. “If there’s some big new idea behind it, maybe. But there’s nothing that I’m looking at and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, now that ‘The Jazz Singer’ is out, I’m going to redo this.’”
Many creators were clearly eager to do something with “The Great Gatsby,” which has been subject to several reinterpretations in very different flavors since it went public in 2021, says Jennifer Jenkins, law professor and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Dominion. public.
“We have our feminist retellings of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ where Jordan tells the story from her perspective, Daisy tells the story from her perspective,” says Jenkins. we have musicals, we have TV shows, we have the zombie version because we always do these things that you can do with public domain work.
But the new works and characters available are arriving after years of parent companies demanding that each creation be tied to their intellectual property. And with a few big, “Barbie”-sized exceptions, the returns are dwindling and the artists themselves are a little tired of it.
“The biggest limiting factor at the moment is that almost everything anyone wants has to be from existing IP,” says Johnston, whose newest project is an animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” for Netflix. an original idea is somehow scary, certainly for a marketing entity, because they just have to work harder to get it into the public’s consciousness.
And while Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen have been public domain goldmines at various times, other properties have proven more problematic. The upcoming Wicked, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, will be yet another attempt to use author Frank Baum’s public domain work Oz – filtered through a best-selling novel and a Broadway show – to achieve 1939 classic status.” Wizard of Oz Movie.” Previous attempts have met with little success, and most have been total failures, most recently Disney’s 2013 “Oz the Great and Powerful.”
(In a strange quirk of the “Wizard of Oz” rights, the film’s most famous artifact, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, is still the intellectual property of MGM through the 1939 film. In Baum’s book, the shoes were silver .)
Some of the most effective uses of public domain properties came from Disney itself in its early decades, transforming time-tested folk tales and romances into modern classics with “Snow White,” “Pinocchio” and “Cinderella.” He would later become the chief protector of entertainment’s most valuable rights, from the Marvel universe to the Star Wars galaxy and local content.
This has meant a huge flowering over the years of fan art and fan fiction, with which the company has a mixed relationship.
“When you look at how the Disney organization actually engages with fan art, there’s a lot of looking the other way,” says Cory Doctorow, an author and activist who advocates for broader public ownership of works. a lot of opportunities for collaboration that were being missed there.”
He gives as an example binders full of fan-fiction biographies of the ghosts of Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, kept by the teenagers who work there, which he observed while working on a project with the company’s so-called Imagineers.
“Some of this is now part of the tradition,” says Doctorow. “I think creatively it’s an organization that really embraces that. I think commercially it’s an organization that has really struggled with that.”
When the law extending copyright for 20 years was passed in 1998, musicians like Bob Dylan were among the key figures who implored Congress to act. The younger generations of musicians, who emerged inundated with samples and remixes, made no discernible clamor for another extension. In part, this may be because, in the streaming era, many of them produce little from recorded music.
Jimmy Tamborello, who records and performs electronic music under the name Dntel and as part of The Postal Service – a group whose very name caused official version headaches at its inception – says artists are generally happy to let others transform your work on new things. The problem is the companies that stand between them and get most of the financial benefits.
“There is always a company involved,” says Tamborello. “I don’t think anyone would care if it was just artists for artists. I feel like it would be good if it was more open, more free. It seems like it has more to do with respecting the original work.”
He says it was “really exciting” when rapper Lil Peep used his hook from The Postal Service’s best-known song “Such Great Heights” on a track released on YouTube and Soundcloud before he even took the proper legal steps to use it. it in an album. album.
Johnston says age and experience have made him feel less possessive about his own work.
“At the beginning of my career, everything was an affront. Everything made me angry and like, ‘That was my idea! I should have taken credit for that!'” he says. “I don’t want to say that I’m just chill and cheerful, but I think there are very few truly original ideas. …. We will all have similar thoughts at a given time. So it doesn’t particularly bother me.”
Your attitude changes if the remaker is not an artist, but an artificial intelligence. This was a key issue in last year’s Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes – and it’s yet another facet of remix culture that, along with the expiration of copyrights, could change the faces of some of the most renowned characters in the history of a way that no one has ever considered.
“If a writer has feelings for me, that’s fine,” says Johnston. “If an AI steals from me, that sucks.”
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
