Horror games and movies featuring Mickey Mouse announced as Disney’s copyright expires

While Disney has successfully prolonged its copyrights to the original, silent version of Mickey Mouse for decades, that time has finally come to an end. The original version of the character shown in Steamboat Willie is now public domain and film and game makers are already lining up to take advantage of that. 

Nightmare Forge Games has announced Infestation 88, a game inspired by “works in the public domain”, including a gruesome take on Mickey Mouse. Disney has not yet responded, but it still owns plenty of copyrights and trademarks for the Mickey Mouse character, so the company make take issue with the game's revised version of the Mickey Mouse logo, or other design elements for the version of the character used in the game. It is important to note that only the Steamboat Willie version of the character from the 1920s is now public domain, meaning it needs to be black and white, as well as voiceless. Whether or not the company will take issue with this game being made still remains to be seen.

Aside from this video game, a production company has also announced a new film, Mickey's Mouse Trap, planned for release later this year. This will be a horror movie featuring a spookier version of the Mickey Mouse character, similar to last year's film, Blood and Honey, which featured horror renditions of Winnie the Pooh.

Given that the copyright expired on the 1st of January, we should expect to see more ideas like this popping up in the years ahead, assuming Disney isn't able to make any legal case to stop them.

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KitGuru Says: It will certainly be interesting to see Disney's response and how all of this plays out. 

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