It is significant that, at this point in our cultural journey, we have become accustomed to film producers jumping on every single property as it enters public domain, so they can make a cheap and exploitative horror film about it. We have seen Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. We’ve seen Bambi: The Reckoning. We’ve seen the six separate horror movies (including Mouseboat Massacre and Mouse of Horrors) that are based on Steamboat Willie. This is just the world we live in now.
But if you zoom out even a tiny amount, it all starts to look a little silly. Not because it suggests the paying public has a fondness for inarguably bad horror films based on loose interpretations of recognisable figures, but because it’s missing the bigger picture. In other words, while producers are watching eagerly for the next newly out-of-copyright property to exploit (by the way, Babar the Elephant will enter the public domain in January), there is an entire ocean of public domain work just sitting there to be desecrated.
