2025’s public domain works and how you can use them, from Popeye to ‘The Sound and the Fury’

Jan. 1 is Public Domain Day, meaning artworks from 1929 (or 1924 in the case of sound recordings) are now free for all creators to use and abuse to their hearts’ content.

The works of art, music, literature, and film now entering the public domain will be yours, mine, and everyone’s. You can try and do something rude or irreverent with the characters they depict, or if you want you can do something truly subversive: make them into something beautiful.

Below is a breakdown of everything you need to know about the freshly released creative works you can now treat as your own personal outline, canvas, inspiration, or collage material. 

What’s Public Domain Day again?

We’re now entering the sixth year since a decades-long freeze on copyright finally thawed, and activists and copyright law experts — notably Jennifer Jenkins of Duke University — started trumpeting each Jan. 1 as a new de facto holiday called “Public Domain Day.” 2025 is no different, with notable public domain releases dropping on New Year’s Day including still-electrifying books by Earnest Hemingway and William Faulkner, talkie films including at least one by Alfred Hitchcock, and the further unspooling of copyright protection on the bibliographies of Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf. 

However, like last year when Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse emerged from the public domain vault, some of the most significant pieces of freshly unshackled public domain art are the original appearances of two still-popular cartoon characters: Popeye and Tintin.

What’s the big idea with Popeye, spinach, and the public domain?

Where Popeye is concerned, it’s worth immediately drilling down on what this all means for creators who want to tell their own stories about the spinach-scarfing sailor. Long story short: they can do almost anything they want with him, and yes that includes having him eat spinach.  

You may have seen it reported elsewhere that derivative works exploiting Popeye’s new public domain status can’t show him using spinach as a power-up. This would be massively disappointing since the spinach ex machina moment in every Popeye fight scene is a cornerstone of the character’s iconography. 

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Popeye emerged about ten years into the long run of Thimble Theatre, a comic strip by E. C. Segar. In the 1929 installment “Gobs of Work,” the extant character Olive Oyl (who has already been in the public domain for years, for the record) encounters a scrunchy-faced tough guy in sailor garb named Popeye and asks if he is in fact a sailor. His surly rejoinder, “‘Ja think I’m a cowboy?” is succinct proof that Popeye’s personality emerged fully fleshed-out. The trouble, however, is that in 1929 Popeye was never shown eating spinach. In fact, the character “initially derived superhuman capabilities from rubbing the head feathers of Bernice the Whiffle Hen,” Jenkins, the Duke University copyright law expert told me.  

In theory, this could seriously limit what creators can do with Popeye. Not only can’t he be depicted duking it out with Bluto — who doesn’t appear until 1932 — nor saving the life of his ward, Swee’Pea — not introduced until 1933 — but he has to be strong to the finish because he… massages an exotic bird? Would that even be Popeye content at all? 

Fortunately, Jenkins told me, there’s a pretty solid loophole that creators can exploit here: the copyright on a later strip from 1931 has lapsed early, and in that strip, Popeye announces in no uncertain terms that his superpowers derive from spinach:

Credit: public domain

Jenkins and her colleagues, she told me, pinpointed the above strip as the first reference to spinach in Thimble Theatre, and found that the copyright on that particular strip hasn’t been renewed, “so this feature actually appears to be public domain.” Jenkins and company searched for the strip in legal records for Popeye, Thimble Theatre, the distributor King Features Syndicate, and everything else that could tie up the strip’s copyright status, and its copyright truly appears to have vaporized entirely. 

The copyright-free status of that 1931 strip, however, doesn’t unlock the whole Popeye character until Public Domain Day. Essentially, Jenkins explained, “Everything in the 1931 comic that derives from the original 1929 Popeye (such as the character) is still copyrighted until 2025, but new details that appeared only in that 1931 comic, such as spinach power, has long been public domain, so we can bring them together next year.” 

That’s great news for creators who can now express themselves all they want through the Popeye character — or, more likely, churn the beloved cartoon character into a lazy and terrible slasher movie, as is their right.  

Tintin in the Land of Public Domain

“Tintin enters the U.S. public domain in 2025 but is still copyrighted in the E.U. until 2054, because the author died in 1983,” according to Jenkins’ blog post about Public Domain Day 2025. It’s a relatively rare case of U.S. public domain law being less stringent than the laws abroad.

At any rate, Tintin started entirely as a work of anti-communist propaganda printed in a Belgian fascist newspaper called Le Vingtième Siècle. In the series of strips now entering the public domain, Tintin is employed as a plucky foreign correspondent for Le Vingtième Siècle deployed to Moscow, en route to which he is almost immediately attacked by a bomb-throwing Bolshevik terrorist, and then further accosted by censorious commies for being a bourgeois pig who threatens to blow the whistle on the reds and their evil exploits.

However, Tintin is every bit his adventurous self, even in this early form, and his dog Snowy is along for the ride. If you want to spin your own Tintin yarns, with or without a hard right-wing slant, nothing should stop you from following your muse.

Mickey talks!

You’ll recall that Mickey Mouse officially entered the public domain last year, and there was a bit of handwringing about whether derivative works were allowed to depict him in white gloves or — since he was kind of a jerk in the early films — be cheerful. And since 1928 Mickey’s utterances were basically limited to whistling, it was pretty clear that he couldn’t talk. This year the vise around the version of Mickey we all know and love will ease a bit, because The Karnival Kid, in which Mickey speaks his first words — “Hot dogs! Hot dogs!” — will be unlocked. And if his raspy smoker’s voice in The Karnival Kid puts you off, never fear, in shorts like The Haunted House, Mickey’s voice — and personality — settle into familiar and appropriately Mousey territory.

Somewhat unrelatedly, The Skeleton Dance, the first of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies series will also enter the public domain, which is great news because The Skeleton Dance still whips.

Keep in mind, as usual, that these Disney properties still may be part of legitimate trademarks, which is different from copyright. This means it would be ill-advised, legally speaking, to open a restaurant called Mickey’s Hot Dogs! Hot Dogs! in honor of The Karnival Kid. Someone might reasonably think the restaurant is affiliated with The Walt Disney Company (And come to think of it, it would be wise to tread lightly around the Popeye trademark while you’re at it, for related — though somewhat different — reasons).

T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land has already been in the public domain for years, meaning nothing has been stopping you for complaining that “April is the cruellest month,” without fear of lawyers beating down your door. Ash Wednesday, about Eliot’s rough journey to faith through Orthodox Christianity is about to be available for use and adaptation too.

My suggested use for Ash Wedensday would be to intone it in a growl over slow, heavy guitars, because, like The Waste Land, most of it is, well, pretty metal:

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

If you read it in high school, you already know the deal with A Room of One’s Own: It’s a foundational feminist text that was spicy for its time, including the shocker of a line “Sometimes women do like women.” The basic argument that a woman literally needs a quiet space to be creative — and enough money to feed herself — in order to sustain a writing career may not be breaking news, but the broader message about women’s intellectual freedom is still resonant.

You can now freely riff on A Room of One’s Own, making it into a documentary, a song, or some kind of experimental work of architecture.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

James Franco had to license The Sound and the Fury to make his 2014 film adaptation of Faulkner’s stone-cold classic of modernist storytelling.

Unfortunately, well, the less is said about Franco’s film the better. But here’s the good news: you can answer Franco’s whiffed adaptation with one of your own, and since it’s entering the public domain in 2025, you don’t even have to pay for the material.

Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Ravel’s Boléro

Among the newly copyright-free musical compositions, two masterpieces stand out: An American in Paris, a musical “tone poem” by George Gershwin, which captures the vibe of postwar life (a lot of what’s entering the public domain right now is about capturing the vibe of postwar life), and Maurice Ravel’s hypnotic Boléro — a composition you might not know you love. Go listen to it right now on the streaming service of your choice and tell me I’m wrong.

Boléro is also part of an interesting bit of copyright history: it became an unlikely pop hit in 1980 when it was featured in an NSFW scene in the raunchy Dudley Moore movie 10 and raked in massive royalty checks for the Ravel estate. Those days are over now, and if you want to make money from Bolero, no one else has to get a taste of the profits.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail

Hitchcock’s first sound film, Blackmail, is now in the public domain — so like everything else on this list it’s now free for you to reinterpret or transform.

It’s also just an awesome Hitchcock movie with the kind of visual flair you associate with Psycho. You don’t have to be an artist to take advantage of its public domain status. You can just project it on the side of the biggest building in town and charge admission.

Salvador Dalí’s The Great Masturbator

With a title like The Great Masturbator, you know it has to be a good painting, and boy is it ever. You almost certainly know this Salvador Dalí masterpiece, depicting an erotic and gruesome pastiche of sensual anatomy, faces, and one disturbingly latched-on grasshopper. Want to decorate the side of your minivan with it? Literally nothing is stopping you — other than maybe a sense of tact.

…And more!

This has just been a list of exceptionally famous or noteworthy material. Creators can freely adapt or use anything from 1929 (or 1924 in the case of music recordings):

Literature:

• Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

• Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

• Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves

• Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge

• Is Sex Necessary? by James Thurber and E.B. White

Film:

• Hallelujah by King Vidor

• Pandora’s Box by G.W. Pabst

• The Wild Party by Dorothy Arzner

• Spite Marriage by Buster Keaton

• The Broadway Melody (Oscar winner for Best Picture)

Music:

• Ain’t Misbehavin’ by Fats Waller

• What Is This Thing Called Love? by Cole Porter

• Tiptoe Through the Tulips by Al Dubin and Joe Burke

• Waiting for a Train by Jimmie Rodgers