Originally posted by tasti man LH
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Originally posted by TheCountAlucard
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Disney has consistently proven that the public domain can be a great source of cinematic inspiration. It's actually rather frustrating that they've strangled it so thoroughly after exploiting it so consistently.
How many of the movies you mentioned have a ton of competition despite being public domain? Their public domain status was more, "Disney managed to sit on it," rather than them being open to lots of people making movies and lots of gems coming out of the process. This is especially true because Disney's history is full of stories that don't exactly work well as franchises like Star Wars (the sequels to most of the Disney animated canon are... not so good).
Despite Disney's efforts, there aren't exactly a lot of Aladdin movies to make after Aladdin that are worth doing. The Aladdin world isn't worth expanding on. Etc. What's everyone else supposed to do besides try to copy the existing movie; maybe with some twist that usually ends up turning people off.
I think the sheer dearth we have of stuff that's been added to the public domain in recent years (thanks in no small part to Disney pushing for the laws about when things can the public domain being changed) makes these kinds of assumptions a bit iffy.
Even the few examples of public domain recent properties aren't encouraging. The Night of the Living Dead being public domain didn't lead to a huge number of gem "Night of..." films. There's plenty of good zombie movies out there, but most of them didn't need the first major modern zombie movie to be public domain to exist beyond maybe all the turds saturating horror films to make the genre tropes common and well defined.
Of course, part of the problem is that the list of US made films that were allowed to lapse into the public domain is pretty short. Roger Corman generally didn't bother renewing his, but how many people are thinking there's a cash cow if redoing Corman movies anyway?
Basically, while the evidence against might be sparse... at least it exists. There isn't really evidence for letting Star Wars go public domain as a good thing for future films.
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