THE ANGELS –
The giant teddy bear, with a crooked smile on his face, lumbers across the screen. Menacing music is heard. Shadows mask unknown threats. Christopher Robin prays for his life. And is that a sledgehammer about to pulverize a secondary character’s head?
This is how the trailer for the 2023 film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” unfolds, a slasher movie riff on AA Milne’s beloved characters, presented by… the expiration of copyright and the arrival of the classic children’s novel to the American public domain.
We were already living in an era full of remixes and reuses, 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 shape a new generation of stories and stories. ideas.
After a two-decade drought caused by Congressional copyright term extensions in 1998, works again began entering the public domain (being available for use without license or payment) in 2019. The public began to be realized in 2022, when Winnie the Pooh became free for use when the 95-year copyright period of the novel that introduced him passed.
That made “Blood and Honey” possible, not to mention a sequel released last month, a third coming soon, 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 he 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 heights of 20th century pop culture, including Superman, are yet to come.
Classic characters, new stories, new mixes. Will it all be a bonanza for creators? Are we entering a heyday of intergenerational collaboration or a precipitous decline in intellectual property values as audiences tire of seeing variations on the same old stories?
Does a killer Pooh Bear have anything to show the world of 21st century entertainment?
Could this make a big difference?
Films from Hollywood’s first era of talkies have begun to become public. King Kong, who already has one of his enormous feet in the public domain due to complications between the companies that own a part of him, will throw off his remaining chains in 2029. Then, in the 2030s, Superman will rise into the public domain, followed in quick succession by Batman, the Joker and Wonder Woman.
The possibility of new stories is enormous. So is the possibility of repetition. Classic stories and characters can be a bit boring.
“I don’t feel like it’s going to make a huge difference,” says Phil Johnston, an Oscar nominee who co-wrote Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” in 2011 and co-wrote and co-directed its sequel, 2018’s “Ralph.”
“For example, ‘Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey’ was a novelty, I guess it caused a bit of a stir. But if someone turns ‘Steamboat Willie’ into a jet ski movie or something, who cares? he says. “If there is some great new idea behind this, maybe. But I don’t see anything that makes me think, ‘Oh my God, now that ‘The Jazz Singer’ is out, I’m going to remake that.'”
Many creators were clearly eager to do something with “The Great Gatsby,” which has been the subject of several reinterpretations of very different flavors since it became public in 2021, says Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor and director of the Center for the Study of Law. Duke Justice. Public domain.
“We have our feminist versions of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ where Jordan tells the story from her perspective, Daisy tells the story from her perspective,” Jenkins says. “We have prequels, we have sequels, we have musicals, we have television shows, we have the zombie version because we always have it. These are things you can do with public domain work. These are things you can do with Mickey Mouse.”
But the newly available works and characters come after years of parent corporations requiring each creation to be tied to their intellectual property. And with some big exceptions, the size of “Barbie,” the returns are becoming scarcer and the artists themselves are a little fed up with it.
“The biggest limiting factor right now is that almost everything anyone wants has to come from existing intellectual property,” says Johnston, whose most recent project is an animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” for Netflix. The original idea is somewhat terrifying, certainly for a marketing entity, because they simply have to work harder to get it into the public consciousness. That’s the bad thing.”
And while Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen have been public domain goldmines at various times, other properties have proven more problematic. The upcoming film “Wicked,” starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, will be another attempt to use author Frank Baum’s public domain Oz work, filtered through a hit novel and a Broadway show, to achieve the status of classic movie from 1939. Movie “The Wizard of Oz”. Previous attempts met with little success and most were outright failures, most recently with Disney’s 2013 “Oz the Great and Power.”
(In a strange quirk of “The Wizard of Oz” rights, the film’s most famous artifact, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, remain the intellectual property of MGM through the 1939 film. In Baum’s book , the shoes were silver).
The ruby slippers once worn by Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ are displayed at a news conference on Sept. 4, 2018, at the FBI office in Brooklyn Center, Minn. (AP Photo/Jeff Baenen)
At first, Disney led the way with the success of the public domain.
Some of the most effective uses ever made of public domain properties came from Disney itself in its early decades, turning popular tales and time-tested novels 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 its local content.
That has meant a great flourishing 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 relates to fan art, there are many who look the other way,” says Cory Doctorow, an author and activist who advocates for broader public ownership of works. “I always thought there were so many opportunities for collaboration that were being missed there.”
He gives as an example folders full of fanfiction biographies of the ghosts of Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, maintained by the teenagers who work there, which he observed when working on a project with the company’s so-called Imagineers.
“Some of this is now part of history,” Doctorow says. “I think, creatively, it’s an organization that really embraces it. “I think commercially it is 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 awash in samples and remixes, made no discernible clamor for another extension. In part, this could be because, in the age of streaming, many of them earn 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 name caused headaches with the official version in its early days, says artists are generally happy to let others convert your work on new things. The problem is the companies that come between them and reap most of the financial benefit.
“There’s always a corporation involved,” Tamborello says. “I don’t think anyone would care if it were just artists among artists. I feel like it would be good if I were more open, more free. It seems that it has more to do with respecting the original work.”
He says it was “really exciting” when rapper Lil Peep used his track from the Postal Service’s best-known song, “Such Great Heights,” in a song released on YouTube and Soundcloud, even before he made the proper legal arrangements to use it. in an 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 think, ‘That was my idea! I should have gotten credit for that!'” he says. “I don’t want to say that I’m easy and carefree about it, but I think there are very few truly original ideas. ….We will all have similar thoughts at some point. So it doesn’t particularly bother me.”
Their attitude changes if the remaker is not an artist but an artificial intelligence. That 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 copyright, could change the faces of some of the characters most famous in history in ways no one had ever considered.
“If a writer has feelings for me, that’s fine,” Johnston says. “If an AI steals from me, that sucks.”