Listen, there’s only so many movies you can make. In fact, it’s honestly kind of impressive that we keep coming up with sufficiently different variations of the same story beats to avoid any copyright litigation. However, on some productions, it’s distressingly clear that someone was playing Mad Libs with someone else’s script.
‘Joker’ is Just ‘The King of Comedy’
Entire essays have been written about the similarities between Joker, about an aspiring comedian who slowly loses his grip on reality, and Martin Scorsese’s 1982 The King of Comedy, about an aspiring comedian who slowly loses his grip on reality. Both protagonists live with their mothers, both target late-night hosts and both movies even feature Robert De Niro. You can’t just add Batman and call it a new movie, although we welcome everyone else to try.
‘Nosferatu’ Is Just ‘Dracula’
As distracting as those little ears that had to be kept in the 2024 remake might be, it’s hard to watch any version of Nosferatu and not feel like you already covered this in high school English. In fact, the producers of 1922’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror made no effort to hide the fact that it was based on Dracula, which is how Bram Stoker’s widow successfully sued to destroy all copies and negatives of the film. What we have of it now has been painstakingly reassembled by film scholars who apparently hate elderly widows.
‘The Fast and the Furious’ Is Just ‘Point Break’
You might think you know if you’re watching a 2001 drag-racing blockbuster or a 1991 surfing thriller, but as Twitter user Andy Ryan pointed out in 2018, it may not be as clear cut as it seems. According to a flow chart he created, both movies begin with “a puckish young FBI agent” who goes undercover to track a group of “extreme sportsmen,” “initially target(s) the wrong set of criminals,” “fall(s) in love with a waitress,” “bond(s) “with the main criminal over shrimp in a beach restaurant,” blows his cover, joins the gang for “one last job” that goes “badly wrong,” and lets “the villain go free at the end, like some massive idiot.” The only way to know is if Vin Diesel is in it.
‘It Takes Two’ Is Just ‘The Parent Trap’
Officially, the Olsen twins’ first theatrical feature is an adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper, but it’s so similar to The Parent Trap that you have to wonder why they didn’t just remake that. The only meaningful difference is that the two identical little girls who meet at summer camp are emphatically and even more confusingly not actually twins, so instead of scheming to get their parents back together, they’re playing matchmaker for one’s father and merely the other’s mother figure, a social worker, because she’s an orphan. Was it a rights issue? Was Disney holding out for a Lohan? Until we get some kind of oral history of forgotten Full House cash grabs, we’ll never know.
‘Avatar’ Is Just ‘Pocahontas’ (Which Is Just ‘Dances With Wolves’)
Hollywood sure loves an outsider who clashes with the indigenous people whose resources he wants to steal and eventually becomes one of them. James Cameron was hoping you’d be too dazzled by his newfangled computer graphics (and based on box office receipts, he mostly succeeded) to notice that Avatar was basically the same story as 1995’s Pocahontas. Ironically, Disney was hoping you’d be too charmed by the musical stylings of Alan Menken to notice that Pocahontas (which bore next to no resemblance to the extremely family-unfriendly tale of the real Powhatan woman) was basically the same story as 1990’s Dances With Wolves, and they might all have been ripping off the 1970 Richard Harris joint A Man Called Horse. It’s white saviors all the way down.
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