Milking the public domain for profit is nothing new, but Steamboat Willie becoming fair game has everyone tripping over themselves to exploit it for personal gain. Since that train has left the station, we’re looking forward to January 1, 2025 to see what IP copyrights are expiring so we can ruin or subvert them.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Martin Scorcese and asshole film school snobs love this influential silent horror film, and we can think of no better way to take the absolute piss out of them by rebooting it as an MCU knockoff where Doc trains zombie ninja assassins in post WW1 German. And if we can get Sony to produce it, there’s a 100% chance they’ll fuck it up.
The Skeleton Dance
Those vultures at Disney built their empire on public domain fairy tales, so once we get our hands on it we’re going to hold this little Halloween staple hostage and desecrate it until they pay us to get it back. We’re talking truly vile stuff like skeleton blood orgies, diatribes about how Hitler did nothing wrong, and replacing the music with Imagine Dragons. Bob Iger has 24 hours to pay or we’re coming for ALL the Silly Symphony cartoons.
The Sound and the Fury/A Farewell to Arms
We’re straight shitting on the legacies of two iconic authors for the price of one. Faulkner and Hemmingway hated each other in real life, so what better way to sully their rivalry than to reinvent their (arguably) best works and mash them together as a road trip buddy comedy through Italy about an ambulance driver and an idiot from Mississippi. Also, we’re going to drop that stream-of-consciousness crap and add a talking cat, Mister Meowsulini.
Little Nemo
If we’re being real there’s nothing about Little Nemo that we’d change, and it has nothing to do with its groundbreaking dream logic narrative and art style. Frankly it’s already tarnished by the character of Impie, arguably one of the most wildly racist caricatures ever conceived. If this kid dreams in bigotry, we don’t even want to know what his waking hours are like.
The Barcelona Chair
$3,000 for a fucking chair? Hell naw. And screw Barcelona, this will now be forever known as the Hard Times chair. We’ll charge $25, make it green, and add a shit ton of studs and zippers that stab the hell out of your ass, thighs, and back. Each one will be assembled in a poorly ventilated punk house basement by a squatter named Patches. Suck on that, you rich jackwads.
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Blackmail”
There’s actually a precedent for fucking up Hitchcock movies thanks to the completely unnecessary remake of Psycho that came out in 1998. We can go lower though, with another copy + paste job but with a cast of today’s most grating TikTok celebrities. Nothing like the words “starring Charlie D’Amelio” to shit on Hitchcock’s grave.
The Works of Frida Khalo
Hot damn are we going to exploit this one. Nothing says feminism like ruining her life’s work by plastering it all over shirts, stickers, coasters, and Stanley mugs. And why stop there when we can run “The Two Fridas” through an AI generator and add a third Frida, or better yet merge her paintings together and market them as new. Hang it in the Louvre!