Popeye sails into the public domain as Hollywood’s biggest copyrights crack open
Happy Public Domain Day… Every year, January 1 pops open a (spinach) can of thousands of creative works whose copyrights have expired, and on Wednesday intellectual property from 1929 became free and legal to use. It includes characters like Popeye the Sailor and Tintin, plus books by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. 1929 was also the year films went from silent to sound, so Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie could get a remake. (For trivia night, the flick’s called “Blackmail.”)
In the past few years, intellectual property from Hollywood’s Golden Age has started trickling into the public sphere, and the copyright crackup has been a goldmine.
Shock value: A horror film featuring 2022’s freshly public IP character Winnie the Pooh went viral and made $7.7M globally on a piglet-sized budget of less than $100K. Horror flicks featuring Popeye are already in the works.
20-year delay… Copyright holders have pushed to protect their IP (and probably aren’t stoked about the slashers). In the ’90s, Disney and other groups lobbied to extend copyright protections to 95 years, up from 75. After the unofficially named “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” passed in 1998, no new creative works entered the public domain until 2019. Critics argued that strengthened copyright law stifled cultural progress, while proponents said it encouraged original works. Disney’s known for filing hundreds of copyright suits and sending thousands of online takedown notices to protect its IP.
IP is precious… but spinoffs can also become classics (as Disney knows). Most recently the film “Wicked,” which pulls from the 1900 book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” is breaking box-office records. You won’t see any ruby slippers on the big screen, though: those fall under MGM’s 1939 movie copyright, which won’t expire for another decade.