This has not been Disney’s ideal 100th birthday. The Marvels, the latest film in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe – which owned the global box office for 15 years – has just delivered the worst opening weekend in MCU history, taking $47 million against a budget of $275 million. And there are potentially far worse problems on the horizon. Not only does Disney have a weak slate for 2024, but a version of Mickey Mouse, the iconic company figurehead, enters the public domain next year after the copyright on Steamboat Willie expires. In 2023, Winnie-the-Pooh entering the public domain produced a slasher movie (Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey with Pooh and Piglet hunting Christopher Robin and a group of college girls through the Hundred Acre Wood). Already there’s an indie film project, Mickey Mouse: Horror House, with an IMDB listing and a release date of 20 October 2024.
It’s a little more complicated than that, of course. Mickey Mouse has been redrawn in different styles since Steamboat Willie so it’s only that drawing that’s falling out of copyright. But, seeing as Mickey’s face has a 97 per cent recognition rate in the US (more than Santa Claus), that’s not going to make much difference to a kid who sees the poster, then has a vast Mickey loom over them in Disneyland.
Disney has held on to Mickey for a long time. The copyright was due to expire in 1983, but Congress extended protection for 50 years at Disney’s behest. In 1997, a new regulation was passed, extending Disney’s Mickey Mouse copyright once again. Without additional legislation, Disney will struggle to stop a Steamboat Willie slasher movie – and legislation is unlikely. Recent spats between the company and Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis over his Don’t Say Gay law have turned Republicans against granting further extensions. In 2022, the Republican senator Josh Hawley suggested stripping Disney of its Mickey Mouse copyright entirely. “The age of Republican handouts to big business is over,” Hawley said at the time. “Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions, while increasingly pandering to woke activists. It’s time to take away Disney’s special privileges.”
It ain’t over til the little Mouse sings, of course. “If something is out of copyright, it’s out of copyright,” says Professor Mark Engelman, a barrister specialising in IP law. “But I can’t promise Disney won’t take it to court. They probably have an entire legal division devoted just to Mickey Mouse.”
Meanwhile, Disney’s centenary celebration animation Wish launches next week and the company will be praying it’s not beset by Marvel-type problems. The latter’s sprawling franchise peaked in 2019 when Avengers: Endgame earned $2.8 billion, the second highest box office take of all time. Endgame ended a complex web of stories that had stretched across 22 movies just as Covid hit, followed rapidly by the writers’ and actors’ strikes. “It’s difficult to say whether this is a real decline in the power of the superhero franchise or a result of the difficulty of promoting things during the strike.
The same can be said for DC’s The Flash and Blue Beetle,” says Tom Harrington, an analyst at Enders Analysis. Disney’s box office difficulties aren’t just MCU related, though. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny from Lucasfilm, Elemental from Pixar, The Haunted Mansion movie, and a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid all underperformed. It would be very bad news if nobody turned up to see Wish.