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Did Disney buy Mary Poppins?

Disney first attempted to purchase the film rights to Mary Poppins from P. L. Travers as early as 1938. However, Travers refused; she did not believe a film version of her books would do justice to her creation.



No, The Walt Disney Company does not "own" Mary Poppins in its entirety; they own the film rights to the character and the specific creative iterations they produced. The original literary rights belong to the estate of P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins book series. The complex journey of how Walt Disney secured the film rights over 20 years of negotiation was famously dramatized in the movie Saving Mr. Banks. Because of these legal boundaries, Disney was able to produce the 1964 classic and the 2018 sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, but they must still abide by certain agreements with the Travers estate regarding the character's use. In 2026, while Mary Poppins is a cornerstone of Disney’s theme park and theatrical portfolio, the underlying intellectual property remains a shared territory between the studio and the author's estate.

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