Mickey Mouse isn’t the only franchise character joining the public domain soon. In 1928, Singapore-born Leslie Charteris introduced the gentleman criminal Simon Templar, aka The Saint. Charteris published dozens of stories with the Robin Hood-like character. The Saint was also featured in radio, film, comic, and TV series, including a 1960s British TV series starring Roger Moore.
The Saint first appeared in Meet the Tiger, which joins the US public domain in 43 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
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Everybody's Libraries 
@everybodyslibraries.com But won't Disney extend the Mickey Mouse copyright again?
Very unlikely at this point. There are no bills to extend copyrights pending in Congress, and there’s now a significant resistance to further extensions.
Ars Technica had an article about this back in 2018, shortly before copyrights starting expiring again in the US. I wrote a related article in 2019, before copyrights ended for the Winnie the Pooh characters (also very valuable to Disney).
[I originally made this reply, formatted slightly differently, on Mastodon, but unlike Irina’s reply above, it doesn’t appear to have propagated back to this blog on its own.]