Obviously there's already a Mickey Mouse horror movie on the way, complete with trailer

2024 has just begun and it's already shaping up to be a historic year. It's an election year, so that'll be fun. It might also be the year when robots take a lot of our jobs. It's also the year that Mickey Mouse, long the mascot of the Disney Corporation, will enter the public domain, meaning anyone who wants to can make movies, artwork, video games and more where Mickey does all manner of unspeakable acts and Disney can't do anything about it.

Well, that's overstating things. Technically, only one version of Mickey is now in the public domain: the silent, gloveless, black-and-white version who appeared in Steamboat Willie, the first-ever cartoon to feature the character. (Not sure who "Willie" is, honestly, but you can watch the cartoon above.) Type "Mickey no" to see what fun people are having with the copyright lapsing. But maybe not where people can see it.

And it's not just edgy photoshops. This morning, a trailer for a horror movie called Mickey's Mouse Trap dropped on YouTube. Directed by Jamie Bailey and written by Simon Phillips, it's about a serial killer wearing a Steamboat Willie mask stalking people at a theme park.

We also got a trailer for Infestation 88, a horror video game featuring Steamboat Willie Mickey:

Both of these projects follow the template of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a slasher film that came out last year after the copyright on Winnie the Pooh expired. A famous kid-friendly character is now up for grabs; make 'em do some sick s*it! And so on. It's not the most original idea, but I get that it's fun to poke the eye of a company like Disney, which has been famously protective of its IP over the years and now has to suffer through this.

Not that Disney is going to let everything slide. As we said earlier, only one specific version of Mickey has entered the public domain, and you can bet that Disney is going to be on the lookout for artists appropriating anything a hair over the line. “More modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of theSteamboat Willie copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company in our storytelling, theme park attractions, and merchandise,” a spokesperson said in a statement, per Deadline. “We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.”

That part about guarding against consumer confusion is important. Disney probably won't go after the people behind Mickey's Mouse Trap because there's no way anyone would mistake the movie for something that Disney itself would release. But if artists try to pass off their work as an official Disney product, they could be in for trouble, whether this version of Mickey is in the public domain or not. Copyright isn't the only part of intellectual property law that protects Disney. It could also use trademark law to take people to court, and unlike copyright, trademarks don't expire so long as they're renewed every 10 years. You can bet that Disney has lots of trademarks on Mickey that it has renewed with unfailing regularity.

So if you want to make some knockoff Mickey Mouse stuff, it would behoove you to make it as vulgar and disgusting as possible, so as to avoid any impression that it's something Disney would actually put out. The legal issues involved in all of this will be teased out over the next several years. For now, it's full steam ahead.

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