Characters enter the public domain. Winnie the Pooh becomes a killer. Where is remix culture going?
LOS ANGELES — The giant teddy bear, with a twisted smile on his face, lumbers across the screen. Menacing music swells. Shadows mask unknown threats. Christopher Robin begs for his life. And is that a sledgehammer about to pulverize a minor character’s head?
Thus unfolds the trailer for the 2023 film ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’, a slasher film 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 were already living in an era full of remixes and repurposings, fan fiction 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 realm, where anyone can do anything with anything and create a new generation of stories and ideas. to make.
After a twenty-year drought due to congressional extensions of the copyright period in 1998, works reentered the public domain in 2019 – making them available for use without license or payment. The public began to take notice in 2022, when Winnie the Pooh was released for use as the 95-year copyright period expired on the novel in which he was introduced.
That made “Blood and Honey” possible — not to mention a sequel that came out last month, an upcoming third and plans for a “Pooh universe” of twisted public domain characters, including Bambi and Pinocchio. The public appearance of Pooh was followed this year by a moment that many thought would never come: the expiration of copyright on the original version of Mickey Mouse, as he appeared in the 1928 Walt Disney short film, “Steamboat Willie ‘.
The mouse and the bear are just the beginning. The highlights of 20th century pop culture, including Superman, lie ahead.
Classic characters, new stories, fresh mashups. Will it all be a celebration for makers? Are we entering a heyday of intergenerational collaboration or a decline in intellectual property values as audiences grow tired of seeing variations on the same old stories?
Does a murderous Pooh bear have anything to show for the 21st century entertainment world?
Films from Hollywood’s early talkie era are starting to go public. King Kong, which already has one of its huge feet in the public domain due to complications between companies that own part of it, will lose its remaining chains in 2029. Next, Superman will fly into the public domain in the 2030s, followed in quick succession by Batman, the Joker and Wonder Woman.
The possibilities for new stories are enormous. This also applies to the possibility of recurrence. Classic stories and characters can get a little tiring.
“I don’t feel like it’s going to make that much of a difference,” said Phil Johnston, an Oscar nominee who co-wrote Disney’s 2011 “Wreck It-Ralph” and co-wrote and directed its sequel, “Ralph ” from 2018. Destroying the Internet.”
‘Like ‘Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey’ was a novelty and made a bit of an impression, I think. But if someone makes Steamboat Willie into a jet ski movie or something, who cares?” he says. ‘If there’s a great new idea behind it, maybe. But there’s nothing I look at that makes me think, “Oh my God, now that ‘The Jazz Singer’ is available, I’m going to do that again.”
Many creators were clearly eager to do something with “The Great Gatsby,” which has undergone several reinterpretations in very different flavors since its publication in 2021, said Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain.
“We have our feminist retellings of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ where Jordan gets to tell the story from her perspective and Daisy gets to tell the story from her perspective,” says Jenkins. “We have prequels, we have sequels, we have musicals, TV shows, we have the zombie version because we always do that. 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 companies demanding that every creation be tied to their intellectual property. And with a few major, Barbie-sized exceptions, the returns are getting smaller and smaller, and the artists themselves are a little sick of it.
“The biggest limiting factor right now is that almost everything anyone wants has to come from existing IP,” says Johnston, whose latest project is an animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” for Netflix. “And the fact that the idea is an original idea is somehow scary, especially for a marketing organization, because they just have to work harder to get it into the public’s consciousness. That’s the downside.’
And while Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen have at various times been gold mines in the public domain, 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 of Oz – filtered through a hit novel and Broadway show – to boost the classic status of the 1939 film to glorify. Wizard of Oz movie. Previous attempts led to little success, and most were outright flops, most recently Disney’s 2013 ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’.
(In a strange quirk of “Wizard of Oz” rights, the film’s most famous artifact, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, are still the intellectual property of MGM through the 1939 film. In Baum’s book, the shoes were silver.)
The most effective use ever of public domain properties came from Disney itself in its early decades, transforming tried-and-tested folktales and novels into modern classics with “Snow White,” “Pinocchio” and “Cinderella.” It would go on to become the premier protector of entertainment’s most valuable rights, from the Marvel Universe to the Star Wars Universe and homegrown content.
This has meant a great flourishing of fan art and fan fiction over the years, with which the company has a mixed relationship.
“When you look at the way the Disney organization actually handles fan art, it tends to 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 missed there.”
As an example, he gives folders full of fanfiction biographies of the ghosts at Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, maintained by the teenagers who work there, whom he observed while working on a project with the company’s so-called Imagineers.
“Some of it is part of the lore now,” Doctorow says. “I think creatively that’s an organization that really embraces that. I think commercially it is an organization that has really struggled.”
When the law was passed in 1998 extending copyright for 20 years, musicians including Bob Dylan were among the key figures who implored Congress to act. Younger generations of musicians, inundated with sampling and remixes, indiscernibly clamored for another expansion. In part, this may be because many of them make little money from recorded music in the streaming age.
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 in its official version at its inception — says that artists are generally happy to allow others to share their transform work into new things. The problem is that companies come between them and gain the most financial benefit.
“There is always a company involved,” says Tamborello. “I don’t think anyone would care if it was just artists for artists. I think it would be nice if it were more open and freer. 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 song released on YouTube and Soundcloud before he had the proper legal arrangements in place struck to use it on a song. album.
Johnston says age and experience have made him less possessive of his own work.
“Earlier in my career, everything was an insult. Everything made me angry and think, ‘That was my idea! I should have taken credit for that!'” he says. “I don’t want to say I’m easy and flippant about it, but I think there are so few really original ideas. ….We will all have similar thoughts at some point. So it doesn’t really bother me.”
His attitude changes when the re-creator is not an artist, but an artificial intelligence. That was a major theme of last year’s Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes — and is yet another facet of remix culture that, in addition to copyright expirations, could change the faces of some of history’s most famous characters in ways that no one has ever thought of.
“If a writer sympathizes with me, that’s fine,” Johnston says. “If an AI steals from me, that sucks.”