The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and more timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.

Over the weekend, movie audiences had a chance to see the R-rated “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” a version of the beloved children’s story in which all of the nearly 100-year-old characters go wacko and, well, it is easier if you just watch the trailer. You will want to wash your eyes afterward.

How could this happen? It is a fascinating fact that Pooh and pals are now in the public domain, meaning a movie can turn them into slashers.

Under U.S. copyright law, works published before 1978 are covered by copyright for 95 years. Then they become public domain on Jan. 1 the year after the conclusion of a 95-year copyright term, free to use and adapt without concern for copyright. That means literature and songs published in 1927 were covered by copyright through the end of 2022. (Note that other countries have different copyright protections.)

Prior to 1998, copyright protection lasted the life of the author plus 50 years. But Sonny Bono and Disney worked to change that by passing the  Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Sonny Bono Act or Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

The Associated Press says, in effect, if you are appalled by a Winnie-the-Pooh-turns-violent movie, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The same director behind turning Pooh into a thriller also has his eyes on Peter Pan, Bambi and many more characters that have or are about to enter public domain status.

In the next 10 years, some of the most iconic characters in pop culture — including Bugs Bunny, Batman and Superman — will pass into public domain, or at least their most early incarnations. Some elements of Pooh are still off-limits, like his red shirt, since they apply to later interpretations. Tigger, who debuted in 1928’s “The House at Pooh Corner,” isn’t public until 2024.

Many have next Jan. 1 circled. That’s when the original version of Mickey Mouse, from “Steamboat Willie,” becomes public domain. It will be open season on the face of the Walt Disney Co. — or at least that early whistling variety of Mickey.

Pop culture, as a concept, was born in the 1920s, meaning many of the most indelible — and still very culturally present — works will fall into public domain in the coming years. There will be all kinds of new and unlikely contexts for some of these characters. Some could be wonderful, some schlocky. But “Winnie Pooh: Blood and Honey” may just be a taste of what’s in store.

The American Writers Museum lists many popular children and young reader books that entered the public domain this year, including:

• “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown
• “The Tower Treasure” (The Hardy Boys, No. 1) by Franklin W. Dixon
• “The House on the Cliff” (The Hardy Boys, No. 2) by Franklin W. Dixon
• “The Secret of the Old Mill” (The Hardy Boys, No. 3) by Franklin W. Dixon
• “The Runaway Bunny” by Margaret Wise Brown

Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, writes a blog entry every Jan. 1 listing some of the books and films that become public that year. The research is based, in part, on what they find here, in the copyright registration and renewal records. Here is some of her list of what will enter public domain this year:

Books:

• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
• Countee Cullen, Copper Sun
• A. Milne, Now We Are Six, illustrations by E. H. Shepard
• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women (collection of short stories)
• William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
• Agatha Christie, The Big Four

Movies:

• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (animated shorts; Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney)
• Metropolis (directed by Fritz Lang)
• The Jazz Singer (the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue; directed by Alan Crosland)
• Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for outstanding picture; directed by William A. Wellman)
• Sunrise (directed by F.W. Murnau)
• The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller)
• The King of Kings (directed by Cecil B. DeMille)

Music:

• The Best Things in Life Are Free (George Gard De Sylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson; from the musical Good News)
• (I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream (Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, Robert A. King)
• Puttin’ on the Ritz (Irving Berlin)
• Funny Face and ’S Wonderful (Ira and George Gershwin; from the musical Funny Face)
• Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man and Ol’ Man River (Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern; from the musical Show Boat)
• My Blue Heaven (George Whiting, Walter Donaldson)

Jenkins explains the reasoning behind the public domain statutes and says we should “celebrate” them:

When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1927 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1927 are out of circulation.

When they enter the public domain in 2023, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.

The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. The whole point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But it also ensures that those rights last for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies.

Just as Shakespeare’s works have given us everything from 10 Things I Hate About You and Kiss Me Kate (from The Taming of the Shrew) to West Side Story (from Romeo and Juliet), who knows what the works entering the public domain in 2023 might inspire?

And, as the AP points out:

It’s worth noting that much of the Disney empire was, itself, built on public domain. “Beauty and the Beast” comes from Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756 version of the fairy tale. “Sleeping Beauty” came from Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale. “Aladdin” comes from the folk tale collection “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.”

And that freedom also allows a movie producer to turn Winnie the Pooh into a murderous bear. It is noteworthy, however, that Pooh’s red shirt won’t be public domain for another five years and Tigger is still off limits for public adaptation for another year.

Will anybody pay to see “Pooh: Blood and Honey?” Consider this. The film cost $100,000 to make and already brought in a million bucks in its debut in Mexico.

Some reviews:

• Rotten Tomatoes calls it “an effortless soulless cash grab.”
• The New York Times says, “It’s not funny enough to have anything clever to say about its gag, and it’s not exciting enough to be a competent horror movie.”
• The Wrap writes, “The film feels half-written, and the half we got wasn’t the good half. Characters and storylines pop up out of nowhere, disappear into the ether, and almost all of them turn out to be pointless.”
• Nate Adams of TheOnlyCritic says, “No amount of booze or drugs could make ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ enjoyable.”

Dive deeper: Congressional Research Service examines why old works that are not producing any revenue are still protected by copyright.

The proliferation of dollar stores in America

Those of you of a certain age will recall the concerns that cities and especially small towns had when Walmart started building stores outside of town. The concern was — and it proved in many cases to be founded — that downtowns would die, and smaller hardware and groceries would suffer. 

Now, a new competitor is showing up in small towns. 

Dollar stores of several varieties are popping up all over. Some tiny towns have several. The Daily Mail explores the phenomenon. (As a native Kentuckian, I appreciate the Daily Mail not making rural people who shop at such stores look like impoverished hicks.)

Another balloon is stirring things up

There is another big balloon floating about 40,000 to 50,000 feet in the air east of Hawaii. Nobody seems to know whose it is. Pilots are reporting it, but the government has not yet confirmed it.

Most food expiration dates have nothing to do with safety?

The New York Times’ J. Kenji López-Alt surprised me with a delightful piece on everything you should know about food expiration dates. Mostly, the piece says, the dates have nothing to do with safety. Baby food, which does have federally mandated expiration labels, is a notable exception. The story says:

Food product dating, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls it, is completely voluntary for all products (with the exception of baby food, more on that later). Not only that, but it has nothing to do with safety. It acts solely as the manufacturer’s best guess as to when its product will no longer be at peak quality, whatever that means. Food manufacturers also tend to be rather conservative with those dates, knowing that not all of us keep our pantries dark and open our refrigerators as minimally as necessary. (I, for one, would never leave the fridge door open for minutes at a time as I contemplate what to snack on.)

Let’s start with the things you definitely don’t have to worry about. Vinegars, honey, vanilla or other extracts, sugar, salt, corn syrup and molasses will last virtually forever with little change in quality.

Since there has been an outsized amount of attention given to the price of eggs lately, I thought this passage would interest you.

The Julian date printed on each carton (that’s the three-digit number ranging from 001 for Jan. 1 to 365 for Dec. 31) represents the date the eggs were packed, which, in most parts of the country, can be up to 30 days after the egg was actually laid. The sell-by stamp can be another 30 days after the pack date.

May your produce expire before you do.

So you want to be a reporter: How to write with ‘color’

My friend Carol Marin, a stellar Chicago journalist who has done everything worth doing in television news, hosts a podcast about reporting. The newest episode includes an interview with Poynter friend Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The episode I am linking to is about “how to write with color.” For people who want to write more powerful stories, this is a good way to spend a half hour.