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Mickey Mouse is going to go from amusing the youngest viewers to terrifying the older ones. It will do so with a slasher – the narrative genre of the vengeful psychopath who chases and kills the protagonists, the same scheme to which Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer belong – in which the famous mouse will become the killer of the passengers of a ship. It is not a crazy idea by The Walt Disney Company to give a twist to its most beloved character, but the consequence of the fact that Mickey and his first short film, Willie and the Steamboat, released in 1928, have turned 96 years old, the maximum age at which works of art enter the public domain in the United States.

The new condition means that the Disney company has lost the copyright on the original work, as well as on the early versions of Mickey and Minnie, who also debuted in the short, and that the characters, therefore, can be used by any artist in new audiovisual or literary works without requesting permission or paying for it. And he who doesn't run, flies. Director Steven LaMorte, a filmmaker known for a few short films and for a zombie movie called Bury Me Twice, has announced with the new year that he has a horror project underway with Mickey as the protagonist and claim. The script exists, although it does not yet have a definitive title and there are plans to start shooting in the spring. LaMorte has already done something similar with The Mean One, a horror parody of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, a book by Dr. Seuss that is in the canon of classic Christmas stories. Now, he says his desire isn't to ruin the characters or make easy money, but to honor and expand them with a new approach.

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There are more new lives for Mickey. With the new year has also come news of another project called Mickey's Mouse Trap, directed by Jamie Bailey, an obscure producer who, apparently, has turned the Disney mouse into the victim of a horror comedy. In a press release, Bailey said his film is shot and that he hopes to release it in March. The references are more vague, but Bailey has included the first images of the bad Mickey.

Disney will do what it can to prevent those replicas from reaching the market. The company has been zealously protecting its greatest asset for decades (in 1988 they promoted the so-called Mickey Mouse Protection Act and achieved an extension on its intellectual property) and still retain some rights to the character. Actually, what goes into the public domain is the short film and that first image of Mickey and Minnie, not the later ones. Nor will LaMorte be able to use the official name of the character, who in his film will be called Steamboat Willie, as the title of the 1924 short. "We will continue to protect our rights to modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain copyrighted and will work to protect against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of our characters," Disney said last month.

The move of turning an adorable character into horror, while striking, is far from original. In addition to the example of the Grinch, we have the precedent of Winnie the Pooh: Honey and Blood. When the Orange Bear entered the public domain, an independent production company made its own slasher directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield and soon caught the attention of the internet. So much so, that its planned release for streaming jumped to cinemas in some countries - in Spain it went through the Sitges Festival and then premiered on the DARK channel - and grossed more than five million dollars from a budget of 100,000.

The expiry of copyright varies from country to country, but it moves in a similar vein. In Europe, it reaches 70 years from the death of the author (80 in the case of Spain), the same figure as in the United States, although there heirs can extend their rights for a further 15 years. Or 26, in the case of Disney and its army of lawyers.

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