There’s A Mickey Mouse Horror Movie Coming Out In 2024

It’s official. Mickey Mouse is now fair game to be in a slasher movie. The very day that the copyright expired on the 1928 animated feature Steamboat Willie, which first introduced us to the famously sweet mouse, a trailer dropped for a new Mickey Mouse horror movie. So that’s the world we’re living in now.

The likeness of Mickey Mouse has been protected by the copyright law since 1928, but now that it has run out, sweet, innocent Mickey Mouse is now part of the public domain. The Steamboat Willie version, that is. For the first time ever, this version of Mickey Mouse is fair game for a horror movie. And the new film Mickey’s Mouse Trap, directed by Jamie Bailey, is taking full advantage of Mickey Mouse’s arrival into the public domain. By having a fictional serial killer stalk a group of friends as they hang out for the late shift at an amusement park dressed as Mickey Mouse himself.

“We wanted the polar opposite of what exists,” a producer on the movie told the BBC.

The trailer for the film dropped on Jan. 1, and they even used a short bit of Steamboat Willie merrily floating along on a projector in the movie before an ominous message came up across the screen, “A place for fun, a place for friends, a place for hunting. The mouse is out.”

What must Minnie think?

After a century of seeing Mickey Mouse as the benevolent, high-pitched little hero of every story, it’s taking some getting used to for many people to see him in a horror movie. “I expect this to fail miserably,” one person said. “The official news about a Horror-based Mickey Mouse film left me [angry] and frustrated. Like Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse had always been one of my favorites when I was a kid. I watched the animated shorts, film and shows related to Mickey Mouse and his supporting cast,” wrote another.

Mickey Mouse’s Trap is expected to hit theaters in March 2024. This won’t be the only new bit of media to capitalize on Steamboat Willie’s arrival in the public domain. There’s also a new horror video game coming called Infestation 88 that alters Steamboat Willie into something much more sinister. Apparently there are a whole lot of people who have been waiting with bated breath to turn Mickey Mouse into a villain, whether the general public wants to see it or not.