30 Movies and TV Shows Inspired By Other Movies and TV Shows

The only thing movie nerds love more than originality in movies is complaining that there’s no originality in movies. Where are the truly new ideas? Those lightning-bolt moments of brilliance that arrive in the brains of screenwriters fully formed, make it through the production process completely unhindered and arrive in movie theater s ready to blow the minds of the film-going public. 

The truth is, those lightning bolts don’t really exist, and never have. Art is most frequently inspired by, well, other art — ideas that capture the imagination of the culture, refined and reprioritized into new stories. While ideally the results are so fresh and exciting that the audience doesn’t realize it’s basically a rip-off of something else, it doesn’t make the inspirations less important to the process. In 1977, audiences had never seen anything like Star Wars — aside, of course, from the Samurai films, fairy tales and adventure serials that they, in fact, already had.

Here are some facts about movies and TV shows that were inspired by other movies and TV shows…