The children’s hospital that holds the soon-to-expire literary rights to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has commissioned a sequel.
Having grown up on the Mary Martin TV version, I can’t even imagine such a thing.
Here is the NY Times article about it. And here is the official website.
Reminds me of the much ballyhooed sequel to Gone With the Wind.
Has there ever been a sequel written decades later and by another author that has been successful?
The Classic EE Doc Smith Space Opera “The Lensman Series” had three sequels written decades later by another author.
The books were pretty good and sold well for about 10 years or so. Amazingly they still appear to be in print 30 years later. So there is as least one case of a “sequel written decades later and by another author that has been successful”.
A much older and classic example is that the **Odyssey ** is a sequel to the **Iliad ** both attributed to Homer but probably written by different authors and then the **Aeneid ** was written centuries later by Virgil and is a sequel to both. All 3 are still studied and read today.
Jim
Nope. The copyright on Peter Pan is unique: it does not expire. The UK Copyright Act of 1988 gives the Great Ormand Street Childrens Hospital copyright on the play and any derivative works forever. The hospital gets royalties if you use any of the characters, though they don’t have full creative control, and there are questions at to how enforceable that law is outside of the UK.
Depending on your definition of “sequel”:
The Flashman Novels by George MacDonald Frazier are a series of highly successful books about a character that originally appeared in Tom Brown’s Schooldays in 1857.
Wicked by Gregory McGuire (The Wizard of Oz)
Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin (Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde)
There appear to be six novel sequels to Frankenstein written in 1957-59 by French author Jean-Claude Carriere, which would indicate they were successful, at least in France.
By-the-by: If you live in the US, you may freely download the Original Peter Pan from Project Gutenberg.
It is a terrible read by any standard. It was a play and no where near as well written as the Bard’s. This is a book that is truly better in play or movie form.
Jim
The two *prequels *by Dave Barry and Some Other Guy are pretty good, according to my son. They’re on my waiting-stack. I don’t see why a sequal needs to suck.
For that matter, most of the Oz canon was written by authors other than Baum. Only the first 14 of the ‘Famous Fourty’ were Baum.
That’s a UK law, so how does it apply elsewhere? The US Constitution gives Congress the power to create copyrights for a limited time, and although SCOTUS didn’t agree that repeatedly extending copyrights 20 years at a time was a violation as Lawrence Lessig suggested, I imagine “forever” would be.
My OP was based on an article in today’s* Akron Beacon Journal*. The article had a NY Times byline. "*Peter Pan in Scarlet *is a kind of last-gasp attempt to cash in on Great Ormond Street’s copyright, which runs out in 2007. ‘We thought we would make the most of it while we can,’ De Poortere said. ‘After 2007, it will have so many sequels. At least this is commissioned with our approval, and we will benefit from the income.’ "
Just for the sake of being a pain in the ass, I’ll say that does not meet my definition of a sequel, as the Flashman novels sprang from a character in another novel. Flashman did not become popular until Frazier fleshed him out.
I’m not sayin’ there haven’t been moderately successful sequels. I probably should have said, “Have there even been successful sequels the creation of which was driven by commercial interests?”
The US is a signatory of the Berne Convention, which means it must honor other countries’ copyright laws. If something is copyrighted in any Berne Convention signatory country, then it’s copyrighted in all countries that subscribe to the convention.
The US doesn’t subscribe to all of the Berne Convention, but they do subscribe to the part about honoring other countries’ copyrights. Too much to lose if they didn’t – it would make any US work fair game.
In addition, the US is not creating or granting the copyright – they are merely recognizing another country’s copyright under the Berne Convention.
In the case of Peter Pan, the British copyright is on performances and derivative works, which would exempt the text of the play as long as it isn’t performed. There have been some lawsuits trying to determine the enforceability, but no definitive ruling: usually it’s cheaper to pay the hospital’s fees than fight it out in court.
From Superman the comic book character, we have:
Superman the newspaper comic
Superman the radio serial
Superman the movie cartoon
Superman the movie serial
Superman the TV series
Superman the TV cartoons (several versions)
Superman I, II, III and IV the movies
Lois and Clark, the TV series
Superman Returns, the movie
All of which were driven by commercial interests.
Damn you, kunilou! How much more restrictive must I make my parameters in order to have someone say, “Yes! You’re right!” 
The difference I see here is the notion of a sequel having been commisioned by an organization with an external (monetary) interest.
You lost me, do you mean commissioned by a non-media organization?
Even the Gone with the Wind example you gave was commissioned by a media organization. The EE Doc Smith example I gave earlier was basically commissioned for the combined benefit of the publishing house and the estate of Doc Smith. I am not sure how you can phrase your statement to get a “Yes! You’re right!” 
Jim
We must have different ideas of what constitutes terrible because I thought the novel Peter and Wendy was fantastic. Unlike most adaptations of Peter Pan I’ve seen the book showed Peter to have a wicked mean streak and in many ways seemed more like a real boy. I also thought the story had a rather sad ending.
At the end of the book Peter comes to visit Wendy only to find that she is all grown and has a child of her own. He has long forgotten who Captain Hook was, doesn’t remember his pal Tinkerbell, and is afraid of Wendy. I thought it was rather sad.
Was the lawsuit over that ever settled? I remember reading they didn’t get permission from the Hospital for Sick Children and they were planning to sue (the book was published by a Disney imprint, who have often claimed they own Peter Pan ever since the animated film).
Nitpick because I’m a pedantic nutcase: Wicked was published after The Wizard of Oz, but the book itself is more of a reimagining of Baum’s work than a sequel (you could even say it wanders into prequel territory before Dorothy shows up).
If anything, the sequel to Wicked, Son of a Witch, is a sequel to The Wizard of Oz in the events-following-these sense.
There’s also the graphic novel series called “Lost Girls” about Dorothy, Alice and Wendy meeting as adults…
There’s lots of lesbian sex. LOTS.
. . . only for as long as the work would be protected by copyright in the United States, and no longer. Or as Title 17 of the United States Code puts it, “The obligations of the United States under the Berne Convention may be performed only pursuant to appropriate domestic law.”
IANAL, but it seems like this would be a sticky wicket to SCOTUS. To my way of thinking, Congress certainly is “granting” a perpetual copyright to a work if respecting a treaty results in such an interpretation.
So where does the movie Hook fit into all this, or is that another one of those “it doesn’t exist I’m not listening to you lalala” things?
Although Peter Pan (specifically, the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy) has been in the public domain in the United States since 1968, the producers of Hook (1991) did get license from the British owners of the Peter Pan copyright so that they would be able to release their movie in British commonwealth countries (Britain, Canada, Australia, India and others) that recognize the British copyright.