The original Popeye and Tintin characters from 1929 will be entering the public domain starting in 2025, as their decades-long copyrights are set to expire.
Beginning on New Year’s Day, any creator will have the legal right to use the iconic characters in new works as they see fit, just as long as it’s the 95-year-old comic strip versions. Filmmakers are reportedly already working on three Popeye horror movies.
In addition to Popeye and Tintin, copyright protection of thousands of other comics, books, songs and films also expires next week.
Books to enter the public domain will include Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
In song, the copyrights will lift on George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and Arthur Freed’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”
According to Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, intellectual property protection will also expire on sound recordings from 1924 on Jan. 1, 2025.
This change will apply to “The Karnival Kid,” in which Mickey Mouse speaks for the first time. In an online post to the website of Duke Law, Jenkins noted that Mickey debuts his familiar white gloves and speaks his first words in the film, “Hot dogs! Hot dogs!”
Last year, copyrights on the original versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the silent film “Steamboat Willie” expired, which came a year after Winnie the Pooh lost its copyright protection at the start of 2023.
Other films that will also enter the public domain in 2025 include the Marx Brothers’ first feature film and Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound movie, “Blackmail.”
