When Steamboat Willie hit the public domain earlier this month, it was celebrated with the reveal of multiple new projects involving the character. Mickey's Mousetrap and Infestation: Origins both offered a horror spin on the once family-friendly character.
This week, another Steamboat Willie-inspired movie was announced: The Return of Steamboat Willie. Written by Joe Smith, the upcoming film has been made entirely in Unreal Engine by Fewture Studios.
The synopsis reads: "After 95 years of being locked away, Willie is free and he wants his Steamboat back."
Reception to the teaser has been mixed with many lamenting yet another horror adaptation of the character. Between the unoriginality and the predictable jump scare at the end, it looks like people are starting to turn on the low-budget horror adaptations.
One particular thing to note is the trailer appears to feature actual footage of Steamboat Willie. Despite the character being in public domain, there are very strict rules regarding usage. These rules are what Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey director Rhys Frake-Waterfield warned about when discussing why he wanted to stay away from the character.
[I] noticed some stuff [on a few of the Steamboat Willie projects that] they shouldn’t have done. We didn’t want to go near that character. [Some of these new projects are] sketchy. They think just because something’s fallen in the public domain you can just make up a version of it and then put it out to market and it’s completely fine. [It's about to get] quite scary and extremely costly. I don’t know if any of them are going to, you know, try to make them good.
It's become a concerning trend that the only adaptations we are seeing of family-friendly characters that enter the public domain are of the horror genre. It's becoming stale and predictable, as evidenced by the comments that have flooded the trailer.
"At this point it’d be more original to make a non-horror adaptation of Steamboat Willie," one comment reads.
"All these creators waited for Mickey to be public domain, all so they could do absolutely nothing worthwhile with him," another commenter adds.
Despite the unoriginality of the project, it's easy to understand why many creators flock to the horror genre. The National News wrote an entire article, explaining that a horror spin on classic characters serve as a subversion of expectation and are generally cheap to make with high returns. With The Return of Steamboat Willie being made entirely in Unreal Engine, it couldn't have been terribly expensive. But at some point, creators need to bring something new to the table.