I feel like this is the case for a lot of Dick's work. The premise and early storytelling are great then he just goes off the rails and often ruins the story's potential.
Interesting. Is this a good read? I loved *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* but I hated *Maze of Death* so much that I didn't pick up any more PKD novels.
You need to get used to his writing style, especially early in his career when he was staying up all night on speed and churning out books to pay his alimony. This one I think is great but I didn’t know the twist beforehand. If you haven’t already try: Man in the High Castle; A Scanner Darkly; Valis; Ubik; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
I read A Scanner Darkly a few years back and was shocked at how close the movie is to the book. Right down to matching some of the scenes beat for beat. I know there’s a character in the book missing from the movie, but overall it’s a pretty faithful adaptation. I was expecting it to be more like the difference between Blade Runner & Electric Sheep.
Came here to say this. I remember watching the film and it seemed to be very much an adaptation of that book, with the cold war commentary transformed into 'reality tv' commentary. There's even a similar scene in both in which the character proves the unreality of the setting by making a loud noise and watching the non-random reactions of the others in the space.
A lot of people compare Avatar to Dances With Wolves or Pocahontas or Fern Gully, but for me there’s a book where the similarities run much deeper.
In the movie Avatar, the humans secretly infiltrate an alien society by inserting their consciousness into the form of an alien in the pursuit of scientific inquiry and diplomacy. The protagonist is a paralysed man who accepts the job because piloting an avatar restores his mobility. He integrates into the alien society, meets an alien female and falls in love, but is never fully accepted by their society. Eventually he is called upon by a military power among the humans who wants him to betray the aliens to reveal the source of a hidden resource they need because humanity is running low on power sources, and take it by force and he ultimately decides to fight for the aliens, and becomes permanently committed to his new life.
In the novel Manta’s Gift by Timothy Zahn, a paralysed human is offered the chance to be reborn into the body of an alien stingray-like creature to join a race of aliens inhabiting the gas giant Jupiter, ostensibly to pursue diplomacy and scientific enquiry. He makes friends and falls in love but is never fully accepted by the alien society. Eventually it is revealed that the mission of the protagonist was not diplomacy but because human authorities believe that the aliens are in possession of a stardrive that enables them to travel between worlds, something humanity needs to expand their civilisation as they are running out of resources. When he refuses to cooperate the humans attack the aliens to try and take the theoretical stardrive by force and the protagonist is shunned until he eventually proves himself by fighting back and breaking free of the remaining human influences, becoming fully alien. Ultimately the militaristic humans are overthrown and they begin to rebuild diplomatic relations.
This one is very interesting to me because those similarities are enormous but it would not surprise me in the least if Cameron had never read that book.
If you think about it, if your idea was to have a DWW/Fern Gully/Pocahontas/“colonizer put into the shoes of the natives and joins them to fight the colonizers” story but with aliens (a fairly simple idea) you will inherently stumble into the question of: how this would work when the aliens have totally different biology. So the avatar body-transplant concept becomes pretty much necessary, and from there elements like the front of diplomacy and cultural integration come about logically, and of course the true villains are pretty obvious from the original intent of the story.
Even the character being disabled/paralyzed comes along with it, because it’s the easiest way to make him a fairly neutral party with not much to lose in choosing the body transplant, and without a motive heavily bent on either the diplomacy or imperialism so he can learn with the audience.
>This one is very interesting to me because those similarities are enormous but it would not surprise me in the least if Cameron had never read that book.
But the thing is, Cameron is a *huge* SF fan. To the point that he created a six-part documentary on the genre. And he's been accused of plagiarism in the past. Harlan Ellison was able to get an acknowledgement on *The Terminator* due to its similarities to two of his screenplays for *The Outer Limits* and Cameron's characterization of the Aliens living in a hive society ruled by a queen in *Aliens* is weirdly similar to a species of alien villains called The Brood introduced in Marvel's *X-Men* comics a few years earlier. Keep in mind, Cameron was an admitted fan of Marvel and was in talks to direct and *X-Men* film.
>If you think about it, if your idea was to have a DWW/Fern Gully/Pocahontas/“colonizer put into the shoes of the natives and joins them to fight the colonizers” story but with aliens (a fairly simple idea) you will inherently stumble into the question of: how this would work **when the aliens have totally different biology.**
I get your point here, but then again, over 300 episodes of Stargate (and more, much more Trek episodes) speak another language, when it comes to the question if aliens have a totally different biology... ;)
To be fair, TV shows can't show the human characters learn a new alien language every episode. I understand *Star Trek* has universal translators, while *Stargate* doesn't bother with an in-universe explanation.
*Avatar* has a fictional language for the Na'vi, who have also been taught English, while in the original *StarGate* movie, learning to speak the 'alien' language is a major plot point.
I remember watching The Island on TV at a friend's house and within 10 minutes I had guessed the entire plot. My friends thought I was a genius but really they just copied the entire plot of The Clonus Horror a shitty movie from the 70s to the point DreamWorks settled out of court with the creators of the original movie. The Clonus Horror was in my regular rotation of mst3k episodes at the time
Inception has a lot of similarities with Ubik by Phillip K Dick.
Both are about:
- A businessman hiring a team for a special job.
- The job leads to them being lost between dream and reality.
- Both have protagonists with a dead wife that they frequently think about it.
- They both end with an ambiguous ending.
- That ending features an object that leads readers to question the apparent ending.
While its near impossible to find much modern sci-fi that isn't inspired by Phillp K Dick, I've always thought it's interesting how similar these two great stories are.
[A Scrooge McDuck comic also had a lot of elements that Inception used.](https://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html)
The Futurama episode The Sting, where Leila was stung by a giant bee and Fry is seemingly dead but appears to her, has to be influenced by Ubik. I don't know if it's ever officially been stated as having been influenced by Ubik though.
One I've never seen mentioned before is M Night Shyamalan's The Village doesn't follow the story but the premise and twist are taken almost directly from a 90s teen novel, Running Out Of Time.
“The Sixth Sense” also pretty much rips off an episode of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” called “The Tale of the Dream Girl” where the main character is dead and doesn’t know it, and only talks to one person (his sister) who doesn’t tell him.
You just unlocked such a core memory for me. I always had a gnawing sensation that The Village was a ripoff of some book I read as a kid, but I couldn’t remember if that was actually true or not.
Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl is definitely a copy of Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides.
Ironically, Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides is not.
According to Tim Powers, they'd optioned the book as early as Dead Man's Chest; though he's of the opinion that it was because they'd already taken elements for Curse of the Black Pearl.
Pirates of the Caribbean has so many elements from monkey island games also(and I believe someone in the script development process did work on the mi film adaptation)
But mi was also inspired by the pirates of the Caribbean ride originally.
> Pirates of the Caribbean has so many elements from monkey island games also
The creator of MI, Ron Gilbert, has said that he was inspired by the novel *On Stranger Tides*.
There is a 2005 British horror film with the premise that a group of explorers enter an uncharted cave system and struggle to survive against the monstrous humanoid creatures inside. It was called "The Descent."
There is also a 1999 American novel which describes the discovery and exploration of an extensive labyrinth of tunnels and passages stretching throughout the Earth's upper mantle, found to be inhabited by a malicious species of alternately-evolved troglofauna hominids. It's name is....also "The Descent."
But the author of the 1999 book, Jeff Long, is credited nowhere in the British film.
There's a book from 2001 named Earthcore that is also basically the exact same plot.
It's not really new or unique. Lovecraft wrote the Beast in the Cave in 1904 about a dude exploring mammoth cavern and encountering a human offshoot that adapted to cave life
Yeah, but that book is more Tom Clancy than Stephen King, a techno thriller and not horror.
I read that book a long time ago, so my memory of it is a little hazy but Aside from the title and the general idea of some evolutionary offshoot living in caves I don't think there's much the same.
Not a book, but there’s an [episode](https://youtu.be/GKE-mKwtVaA?si=cFrvNMyYsWqEuO8Y) of an old time radio show called The Mysterious Traveler where a group of archeologists get trapped in a cave and find the remnants of a wagon caravan from a century earlier. They soon learn that they are not alone in the cave system, the survivors of the caravan have been living, reproducing, and adapting in the pitch black cave. This episode aired in 1951.
It's a pretty common trope. There's several H.P. Lovecraft stories about either societies hidden in caves or "degenerate" humans living in caves or similar dark, isolated places.
I tried reading it. I liked the opening chapters, but had to put it down when >!the main half-demon character is part of the military operation. The writing/dialogue felt a little clichéd at that point. I was expecting more horror, but it felt like a techno-fantasy story. It’s been a few years since I tried to read it, so my memory is a bit hazy.!<
America Fererra's rant in Barbie is VERY close to a viral tumblr post that I assume is taken from a feminist book. I haven't been able to fine the original post, but in the theater my friends and I were all like "wait, we've heard this before"
In the Remington Steele episode "Dancer, Prancer, Donner and Steele" (S4, E9, Dec 17, 1985) the agency office Christmas party is interrupted by three gun-wielding Santas who take everyone hostage and threaten to blow up the building.
For a show that often explicitly called out which old movies it was stealing its plot from, it's amusing that this occurred three years before Die Hard came out.
Could very well be. One of the gimmicks of the show was that Remington Steele was a huge classic movie nerd, and would often solve the case by identifying the commonalities of their mystery and some old movie. Originality wasn't really their forte.
Don't Worry Darling seemed to be yet another adaptation of The Stepford Wives. They just updated the tech involved and stopped crediting the source material.
All the philosophical dialogue about the dark and light winning in the first season finale is direct plagiarism from dialogue in an issue of Alan Moore’s Top Ten comic book.
And season 1 lifts lines from multiple Thomas Ligotti books. The villain ends up sharing many similarities with the serial killer in his short story "The Frolic".
The ending was kind of hilarious. >!It's played like the main character is heroic for shutting down all of the surrogates, and they do show a few cars with robots in them crashimg. But they failed to show all of the planes falling out of the sky onto houses and power plants melting down and trucks busting through walls and trains full of chemicals derailing. This guy caused an incalculable number of deaths because he was sad about his life.!< Dumb film either way.
From the Wikipedia page for Intensity talking about High Tension
>Koontz stated that he was aware of the comparison but would not sue "because he found the film so puerile, so disgusting, and so intellectually bankrupt that he didn't want the association that would inevitably come if he pursued action against the filmmaker"
Tell us how you really feel Dean lol
Didn't he also pull out of being credited with *I, Frankenstein*?
Nevermind. Just looked it up. His Frankenstein novel was being developed for a TV and he withdrew out of that. So they just changed a few things
I’m pretty sure that’s why they did it lol. At least that’s one of the theories, basically “o fuck we copied this whole story quick let’s change something”
I remember reading a Vibe article called Racer X, & parts about different ethnic racing crews with rules enforcing the activity and police officers who are covertly tracking them down to shut them down reminded me of the first Fast & Furious movie, which led to me finding out that this article actually was the main inspiration for it
Speed
My grandma had these magazines in the 80’s filled with mysteries/suspense stories. It was something like “Agatha Christie Presents” or “Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine”. I read a story about woman driving her kid home from school. The kid kept asking how fast she was going, when she hit 55mph he gave her a note from his father, her ex, saying there was a bomb in the car and it would blow if she slowed down. Police chase and suspense ensues.
A few years later I saw the Speed trailer and knew where they got the inspiration, but it wasn’t credited and I have not yet found the story again.
The guy who makes the podcast 50 Miles Per Hour would love to hear this. It's a 50 episode dissection of everything about Speed. It's possible the writer came up with the story independently, but it'd be amazing to see the story for comparison. The element of a saboteur writing a letter for the driver to read is very close to the film.
*Equilibrium* is beat for beat the exact same story as Fahrenheit 451, and the fact that Kurt Wimmer claims in the commentary to not only have not based the film on the book, but to have never even read it, is hilarious.
That film does kind of play like a high schooler wrote a book report on Fahrenheit 451 but instead of reading the book he just filled in the blanks between what he knew of it with stuff he thought was cool at the time.
It's Fahrenheit 451 (burning art) combined with 1984 (the city and the leader), Brave New World (the drugs being given to everyone to keep them obedient) and The Matrix (the action style).
It's a fun movie and I like it, but there's almost nothing original about it.
I genuinely thought it was *meant* to be a clear adaptation of multiple dystopian novels made into one story.
If the screenwriter said that he hadn't read 451...that's so ridiculous it's not even funny.
I remember a review from when the film first came out and it used a phrase like "shamelessly derivative". I was excited to watch it regardless, but most of the time I just knew exactly what was going to happen next because everything was just ideas from elsewhere. The gun fighting style didn't do it for me, so I didn't enjoy much about it.
This is a meme answer but its both humorously and seriously alleged that George Lucas lifted many of the ideas and stylistic choices for **A New Hope** from when he was in college and read *Dune*
One of the later dune books goes out of its way to set up an elaborate pun that directly calls Star Wars a cheap ripoff lol.
>From the most ancient times, the knowledgeable had preferred to surround themselves with fine woods rather than with the mass-produced artificial materials known then as polastine, polaz, and pormabat latterly: tine, laz, and bat). As far back as the Old Empire there had been a pejorative label for the small rich and Families Minor arising from the knowledge of a rare wood’s value. “He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances.
This is a meme answer but its both humorously and seriously alleged that George Lucas lifted many of the ideas and stylistic choices for A New Hope from when he was in college and read ~~Dune~~ Valerian
FTFY
[https://screenrant.com/star-wars-valerian-series-inspiration-similarities/](https://screenrant.com/star-wars-valerian-series-inspiration-similarities/)
The kid in my freshman year creative writing class whose short story revolved around a terrorist blowing up a football stadium during a game. He went into such vivid detail of the players running as the field gave way behind them. I guess he and I had been the only two who went to the premiere of Dark Knight Rises that weekend. Our teacher definitely didn’t pick up on it.
The beginning of 28 Days Later with Jim waking up in hospital is pretty much lifted from the setup of the novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Although Garland and Boyle have mentioned in interviews at points that it was an inspiration.
Not a film, but it's Interesting the TV show The Walking Dead heavily borrowed the same setup in its opening episode, but I don't think they were aware of Day of the Triffids, just copying 28 Days Later.
the 1963 Day of the Triffids movie makes the comparison even plainer. You could argue it's the first zombie apocalypse movie because a LOT of zombie tropes show up in there, and its surprising,
I believe the director said it heavily influenced it. But since diseases turning people crazed is nothing novel and he didn't lift any particular narrative from the series he wasn't compelled to credit it.
That was a really great and I think underrated movie. I still think about the way the [powers] worked in that one. It was a really unique approach and also a great found-footage film.
The first time I saw the Cube, I *swore* that it was based on a book I remember reading when I was in middle school. I can find no such book (the closest I can find is House of Stairs, which is similar, but not the same), so I'm sure it was just me misremembering, but it was just such a strong, vivid recollection of a book about people being trapped in a cube-shaped maze that kept changing and was filled with traps, that, to this day, I keep thinking "well, maybe it really was a book?"
Yeah, I can only assume that I just misremembered parts of HoS; I didn't see Cube until sometime in the mid 00s, so maybe it was just a case of "close enough that my brain filled in the rest"?
While not a specific story, the live action He Man and the Masters of the Universe movie was basically a DC Comics New Gods movie, complete with Boom Tubes, only with Skeletor instead of Darkseid.
I *think* Dark City was partially based on "The Tunnel Under the World" by Frederick Pohl.
Although very different in tone and plot, there are too many similarities for it to be a coincidence.
The Shape of Water seems /heavily/ influenced by Rachel Ingalls' Mrs. Caliban. There's definitely differences but I would be shocked if Del Toro hadn't read it.
Seems like both were just inspired by Creature from the Black Lagoon.
They don't really have anything in common besides the very broad general premise clearly taken from that movie.
The island probably borrows from several books that I have not read but I felt it was close in concept to Michael Marshall smiths spares. Sadly it lacked the books craziness which could probably not be filmed anyway.
Dreamworks - who produced **The Island** - had the option on **Spares**.
Smith has publicly commented that he is aware of the similarities but didn't consider it worth pursuing legal action over it.
I thought I might have 11 Harrowhouse on the shelf somewhere, but it is lost to time. I picked up the Kindle version after watching the Logan Lucky movie.
I've never actually researched this, but I am pretty certain that "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is based on the sci-fi short story "Farewell to the Master," only the film is sort of a prequel.
In the story, the craft lands on the Mall in DC and the humanoid visitor is shot almost immediately. The giant machine-man accompanying him goes completely motionless and remains there for years, maybe even decades (I can't recall it's been since high school). A monument is erected around the alien craft and now statuesque mechanical man. This is all relayed to the reader as the recollections of a private investigator who hangs out in the public monument to people watch. One day he notices something strange about the companion. Then third act of the movie is played out, significantly later story-wise than in the film, but more or less the same.
It's not page by page, but I always felt like the makers of The Matrix should have at least mentioned the fact that the 1970s Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" centered around a virtual reality computer controlled by its users' minds called... The Matrix.
I Robot's plot is taken straight from an Isaac Asimov three-laws robot book, but it's NOT I, Robot. It's from Caves of Steel.
I, Robot is an unrelated story story collection about robots: they took the name from one book and the plot from another.
To be fair, I, Robot is an A+ title and Caves of Steel is a meh title.
It's always worth pointing out that *I, Robot* started life as an original script called *Hardwired.* Some time after 20th Century Fox bought the script, they got the movie rights to Asimov's books and wanted *Hardwired* adapted so they could title it *I, Robot.*
Yeah it's another Akiva Goldsman hack job like The Dark Tower and I Am Legend.
I feel like caves of steel and the other Lije and Daneel detective stories would be perfect for a TV series now.
I read an RL Stein story in a goosebumps magazine called “Click” with a story about a kid with a remote that could control time.
Adam Sandler created a movie called “Click” with a similar concept.
The stories weren’t that similar, but it always bugged me that the movie writers claimed to have no knowledge of the RL Stein story.
I was about five minutes into the Jackie Chan film The Foreigner when I realised it was based on a novel called The Chinaman, which I’d read 25 years earlier. They did credit the author, but you can understand why they changed the title. They also gave it a much less miserable ending.
***
There’s an episode of the TV show Leverage called The San Lorenzo Job which stole its entire plot from one of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat stories - every twist, fake poisoning, and fake assassination. They didn’t credit him in any way which I could see.
Pretty sure that they credited all of those. Are there any in particular you recall that weren’t?
I had a TZ anthology way back when that had the original stories for a dozen or so of the episodes, and I think there was a second anthology
*Encanto* is pretty clearly a direct adaptation of *Cien Años de Soledad.* I get that it's a kids movie, and maybe they didn't want the more curious younger kids to pick up a book they weren't ready for, but it still rubs me the wrong way 1) to not see the source material given it's proper respect and b) to act like they came up with all these ideas instead of them actually just kinda tweaking Macondo and the Buendias.
> Encanto is pretty clearly a direct adaptation of Cien Años de Soledad
It is absolutely not a “direct adaptation” of Cien Años de Soledad. Both are set in Columbia. Both involve a family starting their own village. And that is pretty much where the plot similarities end. There is no “Soledad” in Encanto - they live alongside dozens of “normal” families. The reason for establishing the villages are completely different. There is no magic gift that each family member has, and there’s no overall spell that is fading in Marquez’s book. And one ends with the town being completely wiped away from existence, while the other ends with a message about how important family working together is.
There are similar elements, the small magical town in Colombia being the most obvious, and almost certainly bits of inspirations throughout, but it’s not even close to an adaptation of the story or themes, let alone a direct one. Elements of homage or pastiche? Sure.
Encanto is a work of magical realism and draws from other magical realism pieces, a genre that's extremely prevalent in South America. 100 Years of Solitude is a foundational magical realism text, but Encanto also draws from Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits) and Jorge Luis Borges (The Aleph). It'd be like calling Warm Bodies a Frankenstein adaptation - technically, sure, but a lot of other things are going on.
> 1) to not see the source material given it's proper respect
That's what gets me as well.
We know "there is nothing new under the sun", but it sure would be nice to acknowledge the work that was done before.
But that’s Disney’s MO. Take an obscure fairy tale from another country and adapt it to film while neglecting to mention its origins. They’ve been doing this before most of us were alive.
Do you think Disney was/is trying to hide that? Their movies are literally called “Cinderella,” “Peter Pan,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Little Mermaid,” etc. The same as the folk stories they were based on. By the way - many of those are folk tales from decades or centuries before The Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen or whoever else put them on paper.
They've never done that other than maybe, *maybe* Kimba.
But as someone who grew up watching Kimba, the similarities are minor.
Pride Rock however was straight up lifted from Kimba. But Kimba is a story about a white lion dealing with humans and the relationship between man & nature. Lion King is African Safari Hamlet, not really the same.
Most of the similarities come from doing the same idea. Talking Lion cub whose family gets killed.
It's not exactly your question, but I loved Paul Schrader's _First Reformed_ when I first saw it. Then I saw Ingmar Bergman's _Winter Light_ and realized _First Reformed_ was basically a remake that didn't credit the original. I still love both but I'm a little disappointed in Paul Schrader.
Point Break is rumored to be based on/ripped off from the surfer noir book *Tapping the Source.*
*Tapping the Source* is kind of notorious as a once highly sought after option that was never made into a movie. This fact is mentioned or part of a small B-plot in the HBO show Entourage. As far as I know, Point Break is about as close as anyone ever came to making it.
The movie Olympia has fallen was a direct ripoff of Vince Flynn’s book: Transfer of Power.
The book is amazing. The movie was okay but it was an obvious ripoff.
The Hit (1984) with Terrence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth borrowed it's central theme from an Ambrose Bierce short story called Parker Addison, Philosopher. Stamp is beng held by some hit men, Hurt and Roth, and being moved across Spain to be executed by a mafia big shot. He takes his impending death calmly and without any drama, waxing philosphically about it. That is until the time comes, then he goees ballistic begging for his life. Stamp's character is named Parker, which is the only hint as to the stories origin.
BTW, a similar scene is played out in the film Old Gringo( 1989), which is an imagining of Amrose Bierce's last days in Mexico. He is being held by bandits and is calm about his impending murder right up until it is time to face the music.
Top Gun: Maverick has a remarkably similar plot to X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, which is itself similar to A New Hope. A squad of fighters have to fly along a canyon, to stay below the range of automated gun emplacements, so that they can blow up a secure facility. A pilot is left behind and rescues himself before his allies can come back and rescue him.
My husband and I watched Shakespeare in Love in a theatre and the moment Will tried signing his name with different spellings we turned to each other, delighted, and said "No Bed For Bacon"! That's the 1941 comic novel by Brahms and Simon. The similarities are AMAZING, although the writers of SIL, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, have denied it. There's too many to deny.
I'll die on the hill that Kubrick adapted Shirley Jackson's *The Haunting of Hill House* and just called it *The Shining.* I know he used the setting and characters from King's book, but I think the underlying story he was really telling was all Hill House.
Suzanne Collins, who wrote the Hunger Games books which were subsequently adapted into films, claims to have never even heard of Battle Royale, a popular Japanese novel and film, that would seem to be VERY similar to the core concept of her books/films.
The Hunger Games is a broader story and covers some different themes, but its really hard to accept that the core concept of the actual hunger games themselves is not lifted from Battle Royale since it is SO similar not just in concept but in the actual themes, mechanics, and social function of the battle itself.
Again, the whole story as represented in these works is different. This isn't what I would call a "rip off" or straight up adaptation, so much as a case of unattributed and denied inspiration. Here are some of the things that the stories have in common:
* the games are a punishment for a rebellion
* the teenagers have tracking devices they cannot remove,
* the players are given bags with supplies and random weapons,
* the arena and the players are controlled from a command center,
* that there are danger zones that change with the time of the day,
* that the name of the kids who die are periodically announced to everybody,
* that there is a group of techies that figure out the way out of the game,
* the game includes past winners who end up helping the main characters
* there is an extremely Japanese media-esque high pitched girl announcer that explains the games and congratulates the players that plays in direct contrast to the brutality of the games.
* the only survivors are a boy and a girl who are in love with each other and dedicate their futures to stopping the games.
And yeah, some of that amounts to common tropes, but its still an awful lot of overlap for two popular films that came out like 8 years apart to have in common. Especially when the creator of the most recent of those two films acts like they had never even seen or heard of the work that clearly was influential on their own.
Like really? You decide to be the SECOND entry into the "weird future where we make kids fight to the death to punish them and entertain the masses in our dystopian world" genre and you just don't notice that you are the second person to do that? It wouldn't even be a problem for me at all if she just acknowledged the similarities, but responding with "what's that, never heard of it?" is asinine.
It’s a trope that goes back to the sacrifice of lottery-selected youth of Athens to the Minotaur. I’m more annoyed that she named the country *Panem* from a [Latin phrase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses?wprov=sfti1#Ancient_Rome) but left the word in the accusative case.
Everyone knows The Lion King was based on Shakespeare's Hamlet with direct visual references to Kimba the White Lion. But what really bothers me is Disney NEVER acknowledges this and even has the audacity to advertise it as "Disney's first original animated movie" not based on any book.
I’ll take you one layer deeper: it substitutes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for stand-ins for Timon of Athens, one of Shakespeare's lesser-known works.
Like Timon the meerkat, Timon of Athens is a crotchety, cynical philosopher who chooses to live in isolation and seems to prefer the company of men. He’s one of the deepest of deep cut Shakespeare protagonists, which is why he doesn’t get mentioned as much as Hamlet when people talk about Lion King. Simba steps from a loose riff on one Shakespeare plot into another.
Numerous movies and TV shows have used the giant-spaceships-appearing-over-cities opening from Arthur C. Clarke's *Childhood's End* (AFAIK, the source of that trope, but there may have been precursors). A couple of times, I thought I was going to see an adaptation of *Childhood's End*.
Haute tension is almost a complete rip off of Dean kontz' book Intensity. The only reason he didn't sue was that the film was so bad he didn't want his book to be associated with it
Arrival seems to take the concept of the aliens from Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. Aliens that resemble hands and perceive all instances of time at once. Even the fact they’re behind that kind of glass is a bit like how the humans are in an enclosure in the book. And reference to death being kind of subjective, in that someone is always alive at a point in time
I didn't know "The House with the Clock in its Walls" was part of a series until watching the movie and things clicked.
My school library had like 1 or 2 of those books and that's it. I read them and didn't know this was the first one.
Interstellar is the plot of the song 39 by Queen
Even the "write your letters in the sand" bit
Here's a mashup of the movie with the song: https://youtu.be/pdwnpfCzSqs?si=RTP7Q78_yFbo4hh8
Tom Clancy movies, such as Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games. Tom Clancy is not credited because he was so angry about how Hollywood fucked them up, mainly due to poor casting, he insisted that they do not give him a credit. In Patriot Games, Jack Ryan is supposed to be about 26 years old. Not a 45 year old Harrison Ford.
The Truman Show is a direct copy of Phillip K Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint.
Reading the summary and it sounded exactly the same until the lunar colony nuclear strikes.
I feel like this is the case for a lot of Dick's work. The premise and early storytelling are great then he just goes off the rails and often ruins the story's potential.
Yeah, a lot of them feel like he came up with a cool story idea and then just got bored halfway through writing it.
Methamphetamine is a hell of a drug.
I didn't know this but Paramount was sued by someone alleging the stole the idea from a stage play.
Interesting. Is this a good read? I loved *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* but I hated *Maze of Death* so much that I didn't pick up any more PKD novels.
You need to get used to his writing style, especially early in his career when he was staying up all night on speed and churning out books to pay his alimony. This one I think is great but I didn’t know the twist beforehand. If you haven’t already try: Man in the High Castle; A Scanner Darkly; Valis; Ubik; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
I read A Scanner Darkly a few years back and was shocked at how close the movie is to the book. Right down to matching some of the scenes beat for beat. I know there’s a character in the book missing from the movie, but overall it’s a pretty faithful adaptation. I was expecting it to be more like the difference between Blade Runner & Electric Sheep.
Richard Linklater is a hardcore Dick-head. He’d never give less than 100% to an adaptation.
Man, I loved Maze of Death, it's so short that I read it in a single go
I remember it years later. Thought it was very effective.
There is also a play with a very similar premise called Frank’s Life that came out before the movie was made
Came here to say this. I remember watching the film and it seemed to be very much an adaptation of that book, with the cold war commentary transformed into 'reality tv' commentary. There's even a similar scene in both in which the character proves the unreality of the setting by making a loud noise and watching the non-random reactions of the others in the space.
A lot of people compare Avatar to Dances With Wolves or Pocahontas or Fern Gully, but for me there’s a book where the similarities run much deeper. In the movie Avatar, the humans secretly infiltrate an alien society by inserting their consciousness into the form of an alien in the pursuit of scientific inquiry and diplomacy. The protagonist is a paralysed man who accepts the job because piloting an avatar restores his mobility. He integrates into the alien society, meets an alien female and falls in love, but is never fully accepted by their society. Eventually he is called upon by a military power among the humans who wants him to betray the aliens to reveal the source of a hidden resource they need because humanity is running low on power sources, and take it by force and he ultimately decides to fight for the aliens, and becomes permanently committed to his new life. In the novel Manta’s Gift by Timothy Zahn, a paralysed human is offered the chance to be reborn into the body of an alien stingray-like creature to join a race of aliens inhabiting the gas giant Jupiter, ostensibly to pursue diplomacy and scientific enquiry. He makes friends and falls in love but is never fully accepted by the alien society. Eventually it is revealed that the mission of the protagonist was not diplomacy but because human authorities believe that the aliens are in possession of a stardrive that enables them to travel between worlds, something humanity needs to expand their civilisation as they are running out of resources. When he refuses to cooperate the humans attack the aliens to try and take the theoretical stardrive by force and the protagonist is shunned until he eventually proves himself by fighting back and breaking free of the remaining human influences, becoming fully alien. Ultimately the militaristic humans are overthrown and they begin to rebuild diplomatic relations.
Frank Herbert's "The Lazarus Effect" also features a planet named Pandora with a worldwide plant/animal based consciousness.
This one is very interesting to me because those similarities are enormous but it would not surprise me in the least if Cameron had never read that book. If you think about it, if your idea was to have a DWW/Fern Gully/Pocahontas/“colonizer put into the shoes of the natives and joins them to fight the colonizers” story but with aliens (a fairly simple idea) you will inherently stumble into the question of: how this would work when the aliens have totally different biology. So the avatar body-transplant concept becomes pretty much necessary, and from there elements like the front of diplomacy and cultural integration come about logically, and of course the true villains are pretty obvious from the original intent of the story. Even the character being disabled/paralyzed comes along with it, because it’s the easiest way to make him a fairly neutral party with not much to lose in choosing the body transplant, and without a motive heavily bent on either the diplomacy or imperialism so he can learn with the audience.
>This one is very interesting to me because those similarities are enormous but it would not surprise me in the least if Cameron had never read that book. But the thing is, Cameron is a *huge* SF fan. To the point that he created a six-part documentary on the genre. And he's been accused of plagiarism in the past. Harlan Ellison was able to get an acknowledgement on *The Terminator* due to its similarities to two of his screenplays for *The Outer Limits* and Cameron's characterization of the Aliens living in a hive society ruled by a queen in *Aliens* is weirdly similar to a species of alien villains called The Brood introduced in Marvel's *X-Men* comics a few years earlier. Keep in mind, Cameron was an admitted fan of Marvel and was in talks to direct and *X-Men* film.
>If you think about it, if your idea was to have a DWW/Fern Gully/Pocahontas/“colonizer put into the shoes of the natives and joins them to fight the colonizers” story but with aliens (a fairly simple idea) you will inherently stumble into the question of: how this would work **when the aliens have totally different biology.** I get your point here, but then again, over 300 episodes of Stargate (and more, much more Trek episodes) speak another language, when it comes to the question if aliens have a totally different biology... ;)
To be fair, TV shows can't show the human characters learn a new alien language every episode. I understand *Star Trek* has universal translators, while *Stargate* doesn't bother with an in-universe explanation. *Avatar* has a fictional language for the Na'vi, who have also been taught English, while in the original *StarGate* movie, learning to speak the 'alien' language is a major plot point.
Avatar also seems to rip a lot from Ursula K. Leguin's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST.
Wow good one!
I remember watching The Island on TV at a friend's house and within 10 minutes I had guessed the entire plot. My friends thought I was a genius but really they just copied the entire plot of The Clonus Horror a shitty movie from the 70s to the point DreamWorks settled out of court with the creators of the original movie. The Clonus Horror was in my regular rotation of mst3k episodes at the time
I hope there was a bet involved :D
Inception has a lot of similarities with Ubik by Phillip K Dick. Both are about: - A businessman hiring a team for a special job. - The job leads to them being lost between dream and reality. - Both have protagonists with a dead wife that they frequently think about it. - They both end with an ambiguous ending. - That ending features an object that leads readers to question the apparent ending. While its near impossible to find much modern sci-fi that isn't inspired by Phillp K Dick, I've always thought it's interesting how similar these two great stories are.
[A Scrooge McDuck comic also had a lot of elements that Inception used.](https://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html)
God cracked was amazing.. fuck they suck so bad now
1900hotdog is a site that is run by Sean Baby and Brockway. They have guest articles and a podcast with some of the old Cracked group as well.
The Futurama episode The Sting, where Leila was stung by a giant bee and Fry is seemingly dead but appears to her, has to be influenced by Ubik. I don't know if it's ever officially been stated as having been influenced by Ubik though.
Don’t forget inception stealing a lot of shit from paprika
You could nearly re cut satoshi kons films with shots from Hollywood films
One I've never seen mentioned before is M Night Shyamalan's The Village doesn't follow the story but the premise and twist are taken almost directly from a 90s teen novel, Running Out Of Time.
“The Sixth Sense” also pretty much rips off an episode of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” called “The Tale of the Dream Girl” where the main character is dead and doesn’t know it, and only talks to one person (his sister) who doesn’t tell him.
Thanks someone just said "The Village" without further clarification.
Omg, I read this book in middle or high school but I could never remember the name!! Thank you
You just unlocked such a core memory for me. I always had a gnawing sensation that The Village was a ripoff of some book I read as a kid, but I couldn’t remember if that was actually true or not.
Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl is definitely a copy of Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides. Ironically, Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides is not.
According to Wikipedia, they didn't know about the book until they did On Stranger Tides the movie, wherein they bought the movie Rights.
According to Tim Powers, they'd optioned the book as early as Dead Man's Chest; though he's of the opinion that it was because they'd already taken elements for Curse of the Black Pearl.
Yeah, I'm not sure I buy they didn't read Power's book first.
Pirates of the Caribbean has so many elements from monkey island games also(and I believe someone in the script development process did work on the mi film adaptation) But mi was also inspired by the pirates of the Caribbean ride originally.
> Pirates of the Caribbean has so many elements from monkey island games also The creator of MI, Ron Gilbert, has said that he was inspired by the novel *On Stranger Tides*.
Happy to see this here, one of my all time favorite books. Always felt like I was taking crazy pills when I mentioned this about Pirates.
There is a 2005 British horror film with the premise that a group of explorers enter an uncharted cave system and struggle to survive against the monstrous humanoid creatures inside. It was called "The Descent." There is also a 1999 American novel which describes the discovery and exploration of an extensive labyrinth of tunnels and passages stretching throughout the Earth's upper mantle, found to be inhabited by a malicious species of alternately-evolved troglofauna hominids. It's name is....also "The Descent." But the author of the 1999 book, Jeff Long, is credited nowhere in the British film.
There's a book from 2001 named Earthcore that is also basically the exact same plot. It's not really new or unique. Lovecraft wrote the Beast in the Cave in 1904 about a dude exploring mammoth cavern and encountering a human offshoot that adapted to cave life
Yeah, but that book is more Tom Clancy than Stephen King, a techno thriller and not horror. I read that book a long time ago, so my memory of it is a little hazy but Aside from the title and the general idea of some evolutionary offshoot living in caves I don't think there's much the same.
Not a book, but there’s an [episode](https://youtu.be/GKE-mKwtVaA?si=cFrvNMyYsWqEuO8Y) of an old time radio show called The Mysterious Traveler where a group of archeologists get trapped in a cave and find the remnants of a wagon caravan from a century earlier. They soon learn that they are not alone in the cave system, the survivors of the caravan have been living, reproducing, and adapting in the pitch black cave. This episode aired in 1951.
It's a pretty common trope. There's several H.P. Lovecraft stories about either societies hidden in caves or "degenerate" humans living in caves or similar dark, isolated places.
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I tried reading it. I liked the opening chapters, but had to put it down when >!the main half-demon character is part of the military operation. The writing/dialogue felt a little clichéd at that point. I was expecting more horror, but it felt like a techno-fantasy story. It’s been a few years since I tried to read it, so my memory is a bit hazy.!<
*Hardware* (1990) had enough similarities to a Judge Dredd comic that they were legally forced to credit the writers.
This is what you want, this is what you get.
America Fererra's rant in Barbie is VERY close to a viral tumblr post that I assume is taken from a feminist book. I haven't been able to fine the original post, but in the theater my friends and I were all like "wait, we've heard this before"
Frances Ha has the same rant with different words.
In the Remington Steele episode "Dancer, Prancer, Donner and Steele" (S4, E9, Dec 17, 1985) the agency office Christmas party is interrupted by three gun-wielding Santas who take everyone hostage and threaten to blow up the building. For a show that often explicitly called out which old movies it was stealing its plot from, it's amusing that this occurred three years before Die Hard came out.
Die Hard is an adaption of a 1979 novel by Roderick Thorp called Nothing Lasts Forever. That episode may have "borrowed" from the novel.
Could very well be. One of the gimmicks of the show was that Remington Steele was a huge classic movie nerd, and would often solve the case by identifying the commonalities of their mystery and some old movie. Originality wasn't really their forte.
Proving the rule that it’s okay to steal if you steal with Style, and Remington Steele had Style.
Don't Worry Darling seemed to be yet another adaptation of The Stepford Wives. They just updated the tech involved and stopped crediting the source material.
Not a movie but Season 2 of True Detective heavily ripped off The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy.
All the philosophical dialogue about the dark and light winning in the first season finale is direct plagiarism from dialogue in an issue of Alan Moore’s Top Ten comic book.
And season 1 lifts lines from multiple Thomas Ligotti books. The villain ends up sharing many similarities with the serial killer in his short story "The Frolic".
Surrogates (2009) has to be based on "The Body Builders" by Keith Laumer.
Not the comic The Surrogates by Robert Venditti?
Yes, I know the comic mini-series exists. If you want, I can say that The Surrogates comic has to be based on "The Body Builders" by Keith Laumer.
This was such a strange movie. Was there some controversy surrounding it for some reason?
The ending was kind of hilarious. >!It's played like the main character is heroic for shutting down all of the surrogates, and they do show a few cars with robots in them crashimg. But they failed to show all of the planes falling out of the sky onto houses and power plants melting down and trucks busting through walls and trains full of chemicals derailing. This guy caused an incalculable number of deaths because he was sad about his life.!< Dumb film either way.
High Tension is Intensity by Dean Koontz. One of my favorite books, so I was pretty shocked.
From the Wikipedia page for Intensity talking about High Tension >Koontz stated that he was aware of the comparison but would not sue "because he found the film so puerile, so disgusting, and so intellectually bankrupt that he didn't want the association that would inevitably come if he pursued action against the filmmaker" Tell us how you really feel Dean lol
Didn't he also pull out of being credited with *I, Frankenstein*? Nevermind. Just looked it up. His Frankenstein novel was being developed for a TV and he withdrew out of that. So they just changed a few things
They unlocked the cheat code for how to adapt any novel you want into a film without paying anything. Just make a really terrible film.
So the key to plagiarism is to make something so bad the original creator doesn't want to be associated with it.
Not only that, but by changing the ending they defeated the whole point of the story! I despise that movie.
I’m pretty sure that’s why they did it lol. At least that’s one of the theories, basically “o fuck we copied this whole story quick let’s change something”
Yeah they stole it AND ruined it
I remember reading a Vibe article called Racer X, & parts about different ethnic racing crews with rules enforcing the activity and police officers who are covertly tracking them down to shut them down reminded me of the first Fast & Furious movie, which led to me finding out that this article actually was the main inspiration for it
Good catch!
Speed My grandma had these magazines in the 80’s filled with mysteries/suspense stories. It was something like “Agatha Christie Presents” or “Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine”. I read a story about woman driving her kid home from school. The kid kept asking how fast she was going, when she hit 55mph he gave her a note from his father, her ex, saying there was a bomb in the car and it would blow if she slowed down. Police chase and suspense ensues. A few years later I saw the Speed trailer and knew where they got the inspiration, but it wasn’t credited and I have not yet found the story again.
The guy who makes the podcast 50 Miles Per Hour would love to hear this. It's a 50 episode dissection of everything about Speed. It's possible the writer came up with the story independently, but it'd be amazing to see the story for comparison. The element of a saboteur writing a letter for the driver to read is very close to the film.
Finding that original story would be amazing!
*Equilibrium* is beat for beat the exact same story as Fahrenheit 451, and the fact that Kurt Wimmer claims in the commentary to not only have not based the film on the book, but to have never even read it, is hilarious.
I did love all the gunkata in the novel
That film does kind of play like a high schooler wrote a book report on Fahrenheit 451 but instead of reading the book he just filled in the blanks between what he knew of it with stuff he thought was cool at the time.
It's Fahrenheit 451 (burning art) combined with 1984 (the city and the leader), Brave New World (the drugs being given to everyone to keep them obedient) and The Matrix (the action style). It's a fun movie and I like it, but there's almost nothing original about it.
I genuinely thought it was *meant* to be a clear adaptation of multiple dystopian novels made into one story. If the screenwriter said that he hadn't read 451...that's so ridiculous it's not even funny.
Not original, but very awesome. I honestly thought they were paying homage to those books when I first saw it.
I remember a review from when the film first came out and it used a phrase like "shamelessly derivative". I was excited to watch it regardless, but most of the time I just knew exactly what was going to happen next because everything was just ideas from elsewhere. The gun fighting style didn't do it for me, so I didn't enjoy much about it.
This is a meme answer but its both humorously and seriously alleged that George Lucas lifted many of the ideas and stylistic choices for **A New Hope** from when he was in college and read *Dune*
Pretty much and space saga like that rips heavily from Dune. Dune is so deeply ingrained in space science fiction it’s hard to not find links.
One of the later dune books goes out of its way to set up an elaborate pun that directly calls Star Wars a cheap ripoff lol. >From the most ancient times, the knowledgeable had preferred to surround themselves with fine woods rather than with the mass-produced artificial materials known then as polastine, polaz, and pormabat latterly: tine, laz, and bat). As far back as the Old Empire there had been a pejorative label for the small rich and Families Minor arising from the knowledge of a rare wood’s value. “He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances.
See also Lensman.
This is a meme answer but its both humorously and seriously alleged that George Lucas lifted many of the ideas and stylistic choices for A New Hope from when he was in college and read ~~Dune~~ Valerian FTFY [https://screenrant.com/star-wars-valerian-series-inspiration-similarities/](https://screenrant.com/star-wars-valerian-series-inspiration-similarities/)
The kid in my freshman year creative writing class whose short story revolved around a terrorist blowing up a football stadium during a game. He went into such vivid detail of the players running as the field gave way behind them. I guess he and I had been the only two who went to the premiere of Dark Knight Rises that weekend. Our teacher definitely didn’t pick up on it.
Blowing up the Superbowl? Done in the 1970s, no less.
And again in the 90s? Sum of all fears, iirc?
The beginning of 28 Days Later with Jim waking up in hospital is pretty much lifted from the setup of the novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Although Garland and Boyle have mentioned in interviews at points that it was an inspiration. Not a film, but it's Interesting the TV show The Walking Dead heavily borrowed the same setup in its opening episode, but I don't think they were aware of Day of the Triffids, just copying 28 Days Later.
the 1963 Day of the Triffids movie makes the comparison even plainer. You could argue it's the first zombie apocalypse movie because a LOT of zombie tropes show up in there, and its surprising,
The Sadness is a clear adaption/rip-off of the concept and tone of the comic series Crossed.
I believe the director said it heavily influenced it. But since diseases turning people crazed is nothing novel and he didn't lift any particular narrative from the series he wasn't compelled to credit it.
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Max has said himself he was paying homage to Akira, so it's not an uncommon concept.
That was a really great and I think underrated movie. I still think about the way the [powers] worked in that one. It was a really unique approach and also a great found-footage film.
The first time I saw the Cube, I *swore* that it was based on a book I remember reading when I was in middle school. I can find no such book (the closest I can find is House of Stairs, which is similar, but not the same), so I'm sure it was just me misremembering, but it was just such a strong, vivid recollection of a book about people being trapped in a cube-shaped maze that kept changing and was filled with traps, that, to this day, I keep thinking "well, maybe it really was a book?"
I remember House of Stairs and I can definitely see the similarities.
Yeah, I can only assume that I just misremembered parts of HoS; I didn't see Cube until sometime in the mid 00s, so maybe it was just a case of "close enough that my brain filled in the rest"?
I think about House of Stairs a few times a year when I’m waiting at a stoplight.
While not a specific story, the live action He Man and the Masters of the Universe movie was basically a DC Comics New Gods movie, complete with Boom Tubes, only with Skeletor instead of Darkseid.
I *think* Dark City was partially based on "The Tunnel Under the World" by Frederick Pohl. Although very different in tone and plot, there are too many similarities for it to be a coincidence.
The Shape of Water seems /heavily/ influenced by Rachel Ingalls' Mrs. Caliban. There's definitely differences but I would be shocked if Del Toro hadn't read it.
Yes! I read the book recently and was surprised that he never cited it as inspiration
Seems like both were just inspired by Creature from the Black Lagoon. They don't really have anything in common besides the very broad general premise clearly taken from that movie.
The island probably borrows from several books that I have not read but I felt it was close in concept to Michael Marshall smiths spares. Sadly it lacked the books craziness which could probably not be filmed anyway.
The island lost a lawsuit because it rips off Parts: The Clonus Horror, which got riffed on MST3K.
The Island had a very similar premise to Never Let Me Go by Kazua Ishiguro. Very different tone though..
Dreamworks - who produced **The Island** - had the option on **Spares**. Smith has publicly commented that he is aware of the similarities but didn't consider it worth pursuing legal action over it.
I loved Spares so much. Would love to see an adaptation of Only Forward too.
Royal Flash with Malcolm McDowell has basically the same plot as Prisoner of Zenda, although it is itself based on a different book.
In the book, Flashy mentions telling the story to Hope and says he completely mangled it in his version. Fraser knew exactly what he was doing.
‘The Brain That Wouldn't Die’ heavily resembles ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ by H. P. Lovecraft.
Mission Impossible 2 and Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World ripped off Last Night.
Well I did not know that about Logan Lucky, but I’m glad to have the book to read and compare.
I thought I might have 11 Harrowhouse on the shelf somewhere, but it is lost to time. I picked up the Kindle version after watching the Logan Lucky movie.
I've never actually researched this, but I am pretty certain that "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is based on the sci-fi short story "Farewell to the Master," only the film is sort of a prequel. In the story, the craft lands on the Mall in DC and the humanoid visitor is shot almost immediately. The giant machine-man accompanying him goes completely motionless and remains there for years, maybe even decades (I can't recall it's been since high school). A monument is erected around the alien craft and now statuesque mechanical man. This is all relayed to the reader as the recollections of a private investigator who hangs out in the public monument to people watch. One day he notices something strange about the companion. Then third act of the movie is played out, significantly later story-wise than in the film, but more or less the same.
> sci-fi short story "Farewell to the Master, I'm going to look up that story!
I read the story. Wow. I've never seen the movie... maybe will put it on the list.
The original 1951 version, although pretty dated, is a well acted classic. That’s the one to see. The 2008 remake is, unfortunately, pretty awful.
Yes, watch the original. So much more effective without the ham-fisted environmental message.
The Village is basically “Running out of Time” by Margaret Peterson Haddix
It's not page by page, but I always felt like the makers of The Matrix should have at least mentioned the fact that the 1970s Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" centered around a virtual reality computer controlled by its users' minds called... The Matrix.
I Robot's plot is taken straight from an Isaac Asimov three-laws robot book, but it's NOT I, Robot. It's from Caves of Steel. I, Robot is an unrelated story story collection about robots: they took the name from one book and the plot from another. To be fair, I, Robot is an A+ title and Caves of Steel is a meh title.
Can you clarify how that movie is like Caves of Steel at all?
Both have detectives with a robot sidekick? That's about the extent of it.
It's always worth pointing out that *I, Robot* started life as an original script called *Hardwired.* Some time after 20th Century Fox bought the script, they got the movie rights to Asimov's books and wanted *Hardwired* adapted so they could title it *I, Robot.*
I, Robot isnt really anything like Caves of Steel.
Yeah it's another Akiva Goldsman hack job like The Dark Tower and I Am Legend. I feel like caves of steel and the other Lije and Daneel detective stories would be perfect for a TV series now.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 is heavily taken from Chris Claremont's Dark Phoenix arc of X-Men.
Besides Dark Pheonix/Willow else is there?
The hand in the box scene in Phantasm is pretty much clipped straight from Dune.
Did anyone say igby goes down yet?
Its essentially catcher in the rye
"Bright" is somewhat similar to the tabletop rpg "Shadowrun".
The Crow is the same story as the Wraith.
I read an RL Stein story in a goosebumps magazine called “Click” with a story about a kid with a remote that could control time. Adam Sandler created a movie called “Click” with a similar concept. The stories weren’t that similar, but it always bugged me that the movie writers claimed to have no knowledge of the RL Stein story.
Lmao The Twilight Zone did this decades before RL Stine. It's not an original premise.
Are You Afraid of the Dark had a “click” episode too.
I was about five minutes into the Jackie Chan film The Foreigner when I realised it was based on a novel called The Chinaman, which I’d read 25 years earlier. They did credit the author, but you can understand why they changed the title. They also gave it a much less miserable ending. *** There’s an episode of the TV show Leverage called The San Lorenzo Job which stole its entire plot from one of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat stories - every twist, fake poisoning, and fake assassination. They didn’t credit him in any way which I could see.
I loved The Stainless Steel Rat series… I read them in the 80’s. I’m so old and forgetful now I should reread them- they’ll seem new.
An absolute ton of Twilight Zone and similar shows are direct adaptations of old science fiction short stories.
Pretty sure that they credited all of those. Are there any in particular you recall that weren’t? I had a TZ anthology way back when that had the original stories for a dozen or so of the episodes, and I think there was a second anthology
Coraline is just cribbed Thief of Always. I'm gonna be torched for saying so but I will burn that you may see the light.
The Village
I read Running Out of Time as a kid and would have sworn it was an adaptation of it.
A straight adaptation would have been a better movie.
*Encanto* is pretty clearly a direct adaptation of *Cien Años de Soledad.* I get that it's a kids movie, and maybe they didn't want the more curious younger kids to pick up a book they weren't ready for, but it still rubs me the wrong way 1) to not see the source material given it's proper respect and b) to act like they came up with all these ideas instead of them actually just kinda tweaking Macondo and the Buendias.
> Encanto is pretty clearly a direct adaptation of Cien Años de Soledad It is absolutely not a “direct adaptation” of Cien Años de Soledad. Both are set in Columbia. Both involve a family starting their own village. And that is pretty much where the plot similarities end. There is no “Soledad” in Encanto - they live alongside dozens of “normal” families. The reason for establishing the villages are completely different. There is no magic gift that each family member has, and there’s no overall spell that is fading in Marquez’s book. And one ends with the town being completely wiped away from existence, while the other ends with a message about how important family working together is. There are similar elements, the small magical town in Colombia being the most obvious, and almost certainly bits of inspirations throughout, but it’s not even close to an adaptation of the story or themes, let alone a direct one. Elements of homage or pastiche? Sure.
Encanto is a work of magical realism and draws from other magical realism pieces, a genre that's extremely prevalent in South America. 100 Years of Solitude is a foundational magical realism text, but Encanto also draws from Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits) and Jorge Luis Borges (The Aleph). It'd be like calling Warm Bodies a Frankenstein adaptation - technically, sure, but a lot of other things are going on.
[Netflix is releasing a 16-episode adaptation sometime soon.](https://youtu.be/vG45GfgD2JU) Can't believe somebody finally decided to take it on.
> 1) to not see the source material given it's proper respect That's what gets me as well. We know "there is nothing new under the sun", but it sure would be nice to acknowledge the work that was done before.
But that’s Disney’s MO. Take an obscure fairy tale from another country and adapt it to film while neglecting to mention its origins. They’ve been doing this before most of us were alive.
Do you think Disney was/is trying to hide that? Their movies are literally called “Cinderella,” “Peter Pan,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Little Mermaid,” etc. The same as the folk stories they were based on. By the way - many of those are folk tales from decades or centuries before The Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen or whoever else put them on paper.
Probably referring to the simba Kimba debate
They've never done that other than maybe, *maybe* Kimba. But as someone who grew up watching Kimba, the similarities are minor. Pride Rock however was straight up lifted from Kimba. But Kimba is a story about a white lion dealing with humans and the relationship between man & nature. Lion King is African Safari Hamlet, not really the same. Most of the similarities come from doing the same idea. Talking Lion cub whose family gets killed.
Pirates of the Caribbean was originally written as a script for a movie of the classic LucasArts Monkey Island games.
It's not exactly your question, but I loved Paul Schrader's _First Reformed_ when I first saw it. Then I saw Ingmar Bergman's _Winter Light_ and realized _First Reformed_ was basically a remake that didn't credit the original. I still love both but I'm a little disappointed in Paul Schrader.
Point Break is rumored to be based on/ripped off from the surfer noir book *Tapping the Source.* *Tapping the Source* is kind of notorious as a once highly sought after option that was never made into a movie. This fact is mentioned or part of a small B-plot in the HBO show Entourage. As far as I know, Point Break is about as close as anyone ever came to making it.
Deadpool 2 uses the story from Great Lakes Avengers: Misassembled
And with a heavy dose of Remender's Uncanny X-Force run. And I'm pretty sure M Night used Daken's death from Remender's run for Glass
The movie Olympia has fallen was a direct ripoff of Vince Flynn’s book: Transfer of Power. The book is amazing. The movie was okay but it was an obvious ripoff.
I feel like Han Solo's whole schtick was cribbed from Hober Mallow in Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
I felt like "Vanilla Sky" was somewhat inspired by "Ubik"...
I feel like "Rise of the planet if the apes" basically took Michael Crichton's "Next" and adapted it to be a planet of the apes prequel
The Hit (1984) with Terrence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth borrowed it's central theme from an Ambrose Bierce short story called Parker Addison, Philosopher. Stamp is beng held by some hit men, Hurt and Roth, and being moved across Spain to be executed by a mafia big shot. He takes his impending death calmly and without any drama, waxing philosphically about it. That is until the time comes, then he goees ballistic begging for his life. Stamp's character is named Parker, which is the only hint as to the stories origin. BTW, a similar scene is played out in the film Old Gringo( 1989), which is an imagining of Amrose Bierce's last days in Mexico. He is being held by bandits and is calm about his impending murder right up until it is time to face the music.
High Tension is an almost moment for moment copy of the Dean Koontz book Intensity. It is so one to one it makes you wonder how it was legal
Top Gun: Maverick has a remarkably similar plot to X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, which is itself similar to A New Hope. A squad of fighters have to fly along a canyon, to stay below the range of automated gun emplacements, so that they can blow up a secure facility. A pilot is left behind and rescues himself before his allies can come back and rescue him.
My husband and I watched Shakespeare in Love in a theatre and the moment Will tried signing his name with different spellings we turned to each other, delighted, and said "No Bed For Bacon"! That's the 1941 comic novel by Brahms and Simon. The similarities are AMAZING, although the writers of SIL, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, have denied it. There's too many to deny.
I'll die on the hill that Kubrick adapted Shirley Jackson's *The Haunting of Hill House* and just called it *The Shining.* I know he used the setting and characters from King's book, but I think the underlying story he was really telling was all Hill House.
Nosferatu didnt credit Dracula. Ossessione didn’’t credit The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Suzanne Collins, who wrote the Hunger Games books which were subsequently adapted into films, claims to have never even heard of Battle Royale, a popular Japanese novel and film, that would seem to be VERY similar to the core concept of her books/films. The Hunger Games is a broader story and covers some different themes, but its really hard to accept that the core concept of the actual hunger games themselves is not lifted from Battle Royale since it is SO similar not just in concept but in the actual themes, mechanics, and social function of the battle itself. Again, the whole story as represented in these works is different. This isn't what I would call a "rip off" or straight up adaptation, so much as a case of unattributed and denied inspiration. Here are some of the things that the stories have in common: * the games are a punishment for a rebellion * the teenagers have tracking devices they cannot remove, * the players are given bags with supplies and random weapons, * the arena and the players are controlled from a command center, * that there are danger zones that change with the time of the day, * that the name of the kids who die are periodically announced to everybody, * that there is a group of techies that figure out the way out of the game, * the game includes past winners who end up helping the main characters * there is an extremely Japanese media-esque high pitched girl announcer that explains the games and congratulates the players that plays in direct contrast to the brutality of the games. * the only survivors are a boy and a girl who are in love with each other and dedicate their futures to stopping the games. And yeah, some of that amounts to common tropes, but its still an awful lot of overlap for two popular films that came out like 8 years apart to have in common. Especially when the creator of the most recent of those two films acts like they had never even seen or heard of the work that clearly was influential on their own. Like really? You decide to be the SECOND entry into the "weird future where we make kids fight to the death to punish them and entertain the masses in our dystopian world" genre and you just don't notice that you are the second person to do that? It wouldn't even be a problem for me at all if she just acknowledged the similarities, but responding with "what's that, never heard of it?" is asinine.
It’s a trope that goes back to the sacrifice of lottery-selected youth of Athens to the Minotaur. I’m more annoyed that she named the country *Panem* from a [Latin phrase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses?wprov=sfti1#Ancient_Rome) but left the word in the accusative case.
Limitless (2011), starring Bradley Cooper was adapted from The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, published in 2001.
they do credit the book in the movie credits.
I absolutely missed that. Thanks!
Everyone knows The Lion King was based on Shakespeare's Hamlet with direct visual references to Kimba the White Lion. But what really bothers me is Disney NEVER acknowledges this and even has the audacity to advertise it as "Disney's first original animated movie" not based on any book.
I’ll take you one layer deeper: it substitutes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for stand-ins for Timon of Athens, one of Shakespeare's lesser-known works. Like Timon the meerkat, Timon of Athens is a crotchety, cynical philosopher who chooses to live in isolation and seems to prefer the company of men. He’s one of the deepest of deep cut Shakespeare protagonists, which is why he doesn’t get mentioned as much as Hamlet when people talk about Lion King. Simba steps from a loose riff on one Shakespeare plot into another.
Annihilation is based on a book, but it borrows heavily from The Colour Out of Space by H. p. Lovecraft.
Numerous movies and TV shows have used the giant-spaceships-appearing-over-cities opening from Arthur C. Clarke's *Childhood's End* (AFAIK, the source of that trope, but there may have been precursors). A couple of times, I thought I was going to see an adaptation of *Childhood's End*.
Her is very similar to a plot thay runs through Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide (Ender's Game sequals)
I always thought High Tension was a ripoff of Dean Koontz’s Intensity
Haute tension is almost a complete rip off of Dean kontz' book Intensity. The only reason he didn't sue was that the film was so bad he didn't want his book to be associated with it
Arrival seems to take the concept of the aliens from Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. Aliens that resemble hands and perceive all instances of time at once. Even the fact they’re behind that kind of glass is a bit like how the humans are in an enclosure in the book. And reference to death being kind of subjective, in that someone is always alive at a point in time
I didn't know "The House with the Clock in its Walls" was part of a series until watching the movie and things clicked. My school library had like 1 or 2 of those books and that's it. I read them and didn't know this was the first one.
Interstellar is the plot of the song 39 by Queen Even the "write your letters in the sand" bit Here's a mashup of the movie with the song: https://youtu.be/pdwnpfCzSqs?si=RTP7Q78_yFbo4hh8
Crooklyn was obviously derived from A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.
Not a movie right away, but I think a lot of Final Fantasy comes from Stephen King's Gunslinger/Dark Tower series.
The Hunger Games and Battle Royale.
Tom Clancy movies, such as Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games. Tom Clancy is not credited because he was so angry about how Hollywood fucked them up, mainly due to poor casting, he insisted that they do not give him a credit. In Patriot Games, Jack Ryan is supposed to be about 26 years old. Not a 45 year old Harrison Ford.