Rent is based on La Boheme, it never tried to hide it. The character have almost identical names and they swapped tuberculosis with AIDS and it’s 100 years later.
I always wondered if La Boheme hit as hard in the 1890’s as Rent did in the 1990’s.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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I think there's also an important distinction to be made here, especially for many of these examples.
Ripoff - "a usually cheap exploitive imitation"
Homage - "something that shows respect or attests to the worth or influence of another"
I think many of the examples of "good ones" would likely be homages, rather than ripoffs. Although thats not to say, some ripoffs can't be good on their own too.
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’.
After Michael Crichton's Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.
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.
Speaking of Kurosawa, ‘Ran’ is based on ‘King Lear’, and also “includes segments based on legends of the daimyō Mōri Motonari”.
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?
You know more nickle back songs than nirvana.
“Pretty good?” You’ve heard of the movie. It must be pretty good even if we haven’t watched it.
Popular != Good
That’s what it was!
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🎵
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.
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The Orville is clearly a copy cat of Star Trek and is too tier.
It’s 100% meant to be a Star Trek show for someone that grew up on TNG.
Seth MacFarlane is a huge Trekkie and The Orville is him paying homage
i think that was mcfarlanes in intention, and its a better representation of trek, than kurtzman nutrek.
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.
Except it’s not.
You’ve spotted some surface similarities, but they’re most likely coincidental or unconscious influences at best. To my knowledge the creators never said Daredevil was a major influence.
Jaws is basically "An Enemy of the People" (by Henrik Ibsen) in a modern wrapping.
And Avatar is pretty much space-Pocahontas
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.
The video game Spec Ops: The Line is essentially both stories, but set in Dubai after a cataclysmic sandstorm.
I remember reading that one of military story shooter games had a particularly great mission where the player descends on a city from the surrounding elevation or somesuch. And I've heard multiple times recently that ‘The Line’ is quite outstanding with its story and gameplay. Is it the same game, by any chance? I don't think there's any elevation near Dubai, so probably not, but just to make sure.
I don't remember of any particularly great mission descending onto a city, there are some segments that could fot the description, but honestly Spec Ops: The Line is not memorable for its gameplay, it's just average and it's meant to be, the point of the game is in the story. Although I think that playing it now might not be as impactful as when it first released and every other game was a third-person shooter, but it still I strongly recommend it.
Yeah it’s hard to get the same feeling now compared to back in the day when everything was a beige military shooter.
The story is still good but I think that meta layer of “I do this constantly in games and don’t think about it” won’t hit the same way for people that didn’t grow up at the time. A bit sad.
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. s/ Maybe it's more based on Pocahontas than the Best Picture winner from years before /s.
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.
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.
All of them.
There are only a couple dozen or so quality stories.
Everything is a ripoff or mashup of those.
Some have narrowed it down to only 7 stories.
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Rebirth
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Voyage and Return
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.
Battle Beyond the Stars is just The Magnificent Seven in space, which was The Seven Samurai in the west.
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.
Apocalypse Now is basically Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
But in Vietnam.
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