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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> We don’t need to rehash stale stories, but nobody is going to innovate when a ready cash cow is there for the milking.

If the original Iron Man was in the public domain, would they stop making new Marvel movies? Why, because the movies are currently driving demand for issues of Tales of Suspense #39 or Iron Man #1, and wouldn't be worth it without that?

Many of the classic Disney movies are based on stories that were in the public domain at the time of their original publication.

They keep rehashing old stories because they're lazy or are marketing to fans of the franchise, not because the original is or isn't in the public domain.

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Would they stop making new Marvel movies? Largely yes as presumably someone would have already made todays Marvel movies 30 years ago. They tried rehashing the Spider Man origin story several times and people got bored because they had already seen it. I am not saying nobody would do movie adoptions, just that they would be made closer to the original content.

Consider every Shakespeare movie is in the public domain and sure every few years someone remakes Hamlet, but it isn’t a new major movie every year like clockwork. And nobody would be trying to stretch the Hobbit across three Movies to maximize profit.

Licensing isn't the thing that prevents big budget productions from happening. If they wanted to make a bunch of big budget Marvel movies in 1992, nothing was stopping them. They'd have just paid for the rights back then, the same as they do now.

What copyright expiration would get you that you don't have now is tons and tons and tons of fan fiction and small budget productions. A few of which would have been good and most of which would have been both terrible and ignored. Like every school play being Shakespeare, but now it's Spider Man.

And heretical crossovers. Deadpool vs. the Joker and things like that.

But Tangled, Frozen, Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, all the Peter Pan movies, they're based on public domain stories and they're still making major films out of them on a regular basis. The Snow Queen is one public domain fairy tale, Frozen is three movies.

Your examples of public domain movies take a rather flexible view of the source material.

Frozen is a long way from The Snow Queen. A queen had powers over ice there where trolls and someone was saved by a kiss, but in the Snow Queen it was a guy saved by the kiss and the trolls where evil etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at Disney read it, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Peter Pan, Little Mermaid, etc adaptations at least share some basic elements of the story though their at most fanfics and really that’s all I am advocating.

Nobody is going to pay for the rights to the Hitman video game franchise and create The Professional. Because if you mutate the story that much you’re legally in the clear.

Imagine though a world where copyright is at most twenty years under special cases, ten years by default...

» Nobody is going to pay for the rights to the Hitman video game franchise and create The Professional. Because if you mutate the story that much you’re legally in the clear.

We would see new movies using footage from existing twenty year old movies maybe even a different cut of not so old movies.

I think age of five years for patents and twenty years for copyright is the maximum I can support.

Considering they are still making Sherlock Holmes movies and series... Yes they would still be making marvel movies, if they were popular. Other people might also be making them as well.

Using the character’s name is not simply remaking The Hound of the Baskervilles over and over. The recent TV series is both set in the modern day and has 154 episodes, that’s mostly reskinning a detective show not copying decades old scripts.

I don’t mind the idea of The Hulk fighting Godzilla or whatever, I get annoyed when the major blockbusters are rehashing old scripts.

That won't change. The movie studios are currently not capable of good writing.

Even when they follows some book, the moment the movie abandons books quality of writing takes nosedive. (See Game of Thrones, Witcher for prominent examples).

The studios just don't know how to write.

Plenty of good movies get made. It’s the compromises they need to make when aiming for blockbuster billion dollar revenue movies appealing to everyone globally which results in movies that suck.

A little pandering to the Chinese censors and nothing really offensive to anyone else etc.

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