VideoAge‘s September 29, 2022 Water Cooler feature warned its international readers that a new, maniacal Winnie the Pooh was coming to theaters in a horror movie titled Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.
This was a consequence of the fact that in the U.S., copyrights expire 95 years after the publication of the first story. In the case of Pooh, the story was written by England’s A.A. Milne (1882-1956), and published in 1926. In 1961, Disney licensed the rights to the Winnie the Pooh books and characters from Milne’s estate.
The Pooh horror movie has attracted lots of coverage since the VideoAge story, and recently The New York Times pointed out that, “Copyright is principally concerned with works of creative expression, while trademarks are used to identify good or services as coming from a particular source.”
Technically, then, since Disney still owns the trademark for the Pooh character, non-Disney usage of Pooh should not be easily mistaken as coming from Disney. (And in the case of the slasher film, nobody would think that the new film would be associated with Disney.)
Blood and Honey was produced by London’s ITN Studios, directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield (who was also the screenwriter), and was released last month.
According to the Times, a sequel has already been announced, which to us means that the film sector is a supply-side business that turns into Keynesian economics (demand) after a movie becomes popular. In the dietary world this is called a “Sea Food diet,” which means that when one sees food, one eats it.
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