www.fastcompany.com: Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, the low-budget horror film that opened in America on Friday, has grossed more than $2.5 million globally, according to Box Office Mojo.
Admittedly, $2.5 million would be a disastrous figure for most films, but the haul makes Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey a financial hit. This is because the movie reportedly cost less than $100,000 to make, which means it’s already grossed 25 times its production budget
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It’s wild that these characters will soon be fair game for other interpretations and that people are raring to go to exploit these loopholes. It makes me wonder about how far this can be stretched with a public domain character – like, if you write a book about Sherlock Holmes, and the character is based on the original and draws all parallels from that original source material, but you set it in modern day and add your own spin on the world and the characters, are you infringing on Elementary or BBC’s Sherlock? The Winnie the Pooh movie described in the article sounds disturbing. Imaging being a kid and reading all the Winnie the Pooh books or watching the Disney movies and then you’re looking it up and you come across a trailer where your furry little friend is now a demonic killing machine. Traumatizing, to say the least.
Copyright laws are fascinating to me. I’m glad that I didn't have to be the one to figure them out. So many bonkers things come out of classic characters becoming public domain. A lot of good pieces of art also occur but the bonkers ones are certainly what I will be on the hunt for. Specifically with big Disney characters falling into this category soon. Disney works hard to keep their characters and their intentions for them in a tight box. Public domain Mickey Mouse sounds promising in a lot of ways. Especially when people’s first reaction is to turn their beloved childhood character into the antagonist of a horror film. It is exciting that a lot of these characters will be public within my lifetime. I don’t know enough about current copyright laws to speak on what will be public domain in 100 years but I hope that the people alive then are able to enjoy what we have created.
I didn’t really know about this; I guess I did kind of wonder why a Winnie the Pooh horror movie came out… I’m kind of amazed that they were able to produce that movie for less than 100k, that in itself is so interesting considering its gross margins. It’s really interesting to think about what can be done with all of these characters considering the domains are expiring. It makes you think, if people continue to produce works like this with Disney characters – which I think we all know that they will – there could be a time in which younger individuals have never seen these Disney characters in their original format. For example, a younger child today may be aware of the Winnie horror movie (I’m not sure why they would) and only think of Winnie the Pooh as a slasher, a killer, instead of our beloved friend. I’m definitely interested to see how this all pans out as these domains continue to expire.
One of my favorite moments in high school was when I was reading the Great Gatsby in English class and while I was reading it, the book went into public domain. The amount of content folks found in my class, all varieties of books and content that got published was so fascinating. It is interesting to read about how tricky the use of these public domain characters can be after they have entered the public domain and how the use has to be specific to the original publish date. I had heard about the Winnie the Pooh horror movie (Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey) that came out recently discussed in this article, and it’s really cool that it made as much money as it did. I’m curious to see what people are going to create with these new characters as they enter the public domain - and what enters the public domain soon.
I think that one of my favorite discussions, especially in regards to Disney, is how the copyright system works, and how capitalism disrupts the flow of the artistic world. Disney as a company has tried to re-buy out the rights to characters whose copyright should be long over-due to be set within the creative commons, and up until this point, it is no surprise that they have been successful in continuing to hold the rights to beloved characters, and continue to be a behemoth in the face of individual creators. What it comes down to is the fact that Disney has the money to continue to buy-out the government, and will continue to try to if necessary. However, I think it is really interesting nonetheless to see where exactly the government will begin to deny the companies requests to continue buying out their character's copyrights, and how exactly that will play out industry-wise.
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