On January 1, New Year’s Day, a few stories were spread far and wide on Twitter, news that studios and developers were making Mickey Mouse/Steamboat Willie horror movies and games thanks to the character now hitting the public domain.
It’s a weird situation, as it is only this specific version of Mickey, the Steamboat Willie variant from the 1928 cartoon, not the current, Disney version of Mickey Mouse with his TV shows and theme parks. Things get a bit messy and I predict some lawsuits will happen, but we’ll see.
The two most prominent examples of this public domain free-for-all are:
- Infestation 88, a horror video game from Nightmare Forge.
- Mickey’s Mousetrap, a horror movie from Into Frame Productions.
Of course, the goal of these projects, which have been baking for months in order to capitalize on the public domain release, is to get ridiculed across social media which is the best way to…spread the news that they exist. This exact same thing happened with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, when Pooh hit public domain a while back.
Winnie the Pooh, a serial killer? Well guess what? That movie, despite being terrible and trashed by critics (a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes), made $5.2 million on a $100,000 budget. So, would you make some crappy horror game or movie based on Mickey Mouse if it could net you a couple million dollars? I bet you might.
This is, however, so transparently stupid at this point that people may have wised up. It’s also raised questions about why everyone rushes straight to horror for this kind of thing, but that actually makes sense, in context. For gaming, the “thing stalks you in a dark area” genre is all over the internet these days, and I can easily see some Twitch streamers playing the thing for a laugh, getting killed by Mickey Mouse while screaming loudly about it. As for the movie, horror films can often be made with extraordinarily low budgets and have potentially big returns. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s the most logical genre to explore, attracting the most attention and costing relatively little.
And of course, I have played into the entire thing here by writing an article about it. But I wanted to explain “the game” here, as it were, and show how this has worked before with public domain properties, and will probably work again with Mickey and Steamboat Willie, like it or not.
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