Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4554525-20180421033523/@comment-1826156-20180429172210

As CDA said, the Estate of CS Lewis is most likely the owner of the Narnia copyrights. The Estate most likely will hold onto those rights as long as possible, and since it is based in Great Britain, the laws there are different. Disney would have purchased the rights to use Narnia for it's films, and to sell merchandise, but those rights stop at a certain point. They don't last forever. They will own the rights to distribute the films and that's about it.

Disney has been in trouble in the past for using Winnie the Pooh without paying royalties to the A.A. Milne Estate. They've also had similar issues with Mary Poppins, Peter Pan and Tarzan.

Copyright laws are very confusing and all over the place. What may be public domain in one country is not in another.

Another example are the Oz books. The Baum Family owns the rights to most of the 40 canon books after the 16th. But everything before that is in Public Domain. Back in the 50's-60's, Disney actually bought rights to all of the Oz books after the first (Books 2-14) and planned to make movies out of them. This was sadly scrapped and the most they did were some adaptations as books on record. The books were getting ready to go back into the public domain and Disney wanted one last go, making Return to Oz, a mashup of several Oz books. Disney owns the character likenesses and film from Return to Oz, but the stories it is based are back in public domain and free for anyone to adapt.