What comic books, movies, and TV shows are blatantly copycats or rip-offs of previous comics, movies, or shows, but despite being a copycat or rip-off, are still pretty good?
After Michael Crichton’s Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.
F. W. Murnau wanted to make a cinema adaptation of ‘Dracula’, but didn’t get the permission. So he shrugged, changed some details, and made the 1922 ‘Nosferatu’.
Guess what, the original Dracula wasn’t affected by sunlight. That whole trope of the vampire genre comes from ‘Nosferatu’.
Willy’s Wonderland is a way better Five Nights at Freddie’s than the actual Five Nights at Freddie’s.
The Magnificent 7 and A Fistful of Dollars are just Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but westerns.
Polar was ripoff of the Keanu Reeves movies.
Didn’t twilight start as a fan fiction?
Not Twilight itself, but 50 Shades of Gray started as a Twilight fan fiction
Would that fit OP’s question of “actually pretty good” though?
That’s what it was!
I think early Disney movies are pretty good. They usually just took an archaic horror story intended for adults, got rid of all the gore and murder, rewrote the rest, and somehow ended up with a children’s movie. Those ripoff versions became so famous and influential that people no longer think of the originals.
Maybe in two hundred years someone will start ripping off Saw movies to make kindergarten holo-ventures. Oh no! Jeff Denlon, the ice cream merchant, got stuck in the freezer. Can you find the key to the door?
The Lion King is basically Hamlet with animals.
Lion King is as much Hamlet as Frozen is The Snow Queen, which is to say, it really isn’t.
Lion King is loosely inspired by, but doesn’t actually follow the same story structure or present the same conflicts/tension or explore the same themes as Hamlet.
The Lion King is a rip-off of Japan’s Kimba the White Lion.
We talking, like, O Brother, Where Art Thou? being based on Homer’s Odyssey?
I still go back to listen to the music from that sometimes.
🎵I-----aye am a maan, of constant sorROWS🎵
Jaws is basically “An Enemy of the People” (by Henrik Ibsen) in a modern wrapping.
And Avatar is pretty much space-Pocahontas
The Orville is clearly a copy cat of Star Trek and is too tier.
I think it’s just tier enough.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a Daredevil parody/love letter.
They get their powers from the same accident that gives Matt Murdoch his.
Mentor? Splinter / Stick. Enemy? The Foot / The Hand.
Twilight zone! There are different run of the series. Many reimagined stories from the first run, some better than others, as is such with the first run. There are stale episodes by today’s standards.
Ad Astra (2019) is Apocalypse Now (1979) but in space.
Avatar (2009) is Dances with Wolves (1990) but in space.
‘Apocalypse Now’ is based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella ‘Heart of Darkness’, in which the events happen on the Congo river.
Back when Avatar came out, I heard someone call it “Fern Gully with better graphics.”
There was a YouTube trend of making Avatar trailers with the audio but then using the graphics for movies like Fern Gully and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). Turns out there are a lot of ‘going native’ movies.
Avatar is absolutely not Dances with Wolves. It is Pocahontas. Throw in a couple musical numbers and it’s real close to being a shot-for-shot remake of the Disney movie.
Another example of the ‘gone native’ plot line in the wake of Dances With Wolves. Pocahontas had the advantage of Dances With Wolves coming out first. So it smoothed some of those edges.
Where does Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai fit into this?
Sure, same general premise, but the structure is very different between them. In Dances with Wolves, Dunbar is basically abandoned by his people and slowly assimilates into the local village. By the time Dunbar’s people return in the third act, they’re no longer his people at all. In Pocahontas and Avatar, Smith and Sully are part of an active and present colonial force, wind up on generally friendly terms with the locals, start dating the chief’s daughter, and wind up with a strong case of conflicting loyalties, having to pick between their people and their lover’s people when the fighting starts.
Romeo & Juliet was based on Tristan & Isolde
10 Things I Hate About You was based on The Taming of the Shrew
Clueless was based on Emma
“Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.”
Afaik more than a few of Shakespeare’s stories come from contemporary plays, he just retold them in his own manner.
That was the only one I knew offhand, but yeah, his schtick was writing rhyming dialogue for existing stories.
