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31 iconic characters and properties will hit the public domain in the next few years

First, it was Winnie the Pooh, then Mickey Mouse. Many beloved characters are hitting public domain in the next decade and it's about to get absolutely bananas when you see who's up for fair usage.

By Eric Halliday

Disney100 Mickey Mouse statue at Epcot. Image courtesy Rob Schwarz Jr.
Disney100 Mickey Mouse statue at Epcot. Image courtesy Rob Schwarz Jr. /
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So, by now we're all woefully familiar with what happened with Winnie the Pooh when he entered the public domain. We got Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and it sucked and we all felt bad.

Then, more recently, Mickey Mouse (the Steamboat Willie version) entered the public domain and we got a subpar horror game and it sucked and we all felt bad. But this is just the start. The 1920s were the beginning of brand characters. Characters that showed up repeatedly instead of being in one-off stories and shorts. Characters that transcend time...but not copyright laws.

In the next few years, more and more of these characters are going to be entering the world of public domain. So many, in fact, I'm going to call it here, right now, that we're going to get so remarkably stupid with these public domain properties that I bet they're going to reexamine copyright laws. Wanna know what's going to be coming up? Let's look at the next 10 years.

2024

So we already talked about Mickey, but yeah, Mickey Mouse, in his original form, entered the public domain which means that everyone who wants to make a subpar Five Nights at Freddy knockoff can go ahead and do so. But what else drops this year?

Minnie Mouse - Yup. The earliest version of Minnie also hits public domain this year so...I'm ready for the internet to absolutely horrify me with that one.

Tigger (from Winnie the Pooh) - The Winnie the Pooh book "House at Pooh Corner" enters the public domain. And while Winnie and Piglet have already starred in a horror film, House at Pooh Corner is full-on sequel material because this is the book that introduced the bouncy Tigger. So get ready to learn that the wonderful thing about Tiggers is that Tiggers are murder machines.

Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train - The next decade is going to be absolutely AWASH with Agatha Christie adaptations as more and more of her famous books enter the public domain. They won't hold a candle to anything Knives Out can do but they'll be easy to copy and paste.

Makin' Whoopee! - Anyone who's listened to a lot of music from the 1920s will tell you that society was mostly comprised of children pretending to be adults. As such, one of the most popular songs of the time was "Makin' Whoopee," a song about sex that seems to know about as much about sex as a second grader. And while (hopefully) there's no way to turn this into a horror film, I feel like we're going to be hearing samples from this song mixed in with a lot of other songs turning this into the musical Wilhelm Scream.

Check out the next page for what enters the public domain in 2025!

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