Follow The Leader / Live-Action Films

• The massive success of Batman Begins and Casino Royale (2006), Darker and Edgier reboots of worn franchises, led to a trend of failed or declining franchises being rebooted with varying degrees of success.
• The huge box office returns of Jurassic World and especially The Force Awakens in 2015 really cemented the trend of making nostalgic Distant Sequels in the modern era.
• Zoom: Academy for Superheroes was rushed into theaters shortly after Sky High came out, and the epic failure of the ripoff is probably why more films of this Sub-Genre are not being made. Ironically, Sky High is sort-of a ripoff of the old DCOM Up, Up and Away!, which was made to capitalize on the success of another superhero team movie: X-Men.
• Anybody notice how after The Blair Witch Project, horror movies started having characters with a camera or web connection? Examples: Cloverfield, Quarantine (2008), Diary of the Dead, etc.
• The Matrix: The film created a wave of dark, philosophical Science Fiction movies that question the nature of reality, and also popularized John Woo gunplay in action sequences and spawning a whole heap of movies that copy the Bullet Time scene in the movie. Examples include eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor, and Equilibrium. It also brought Cyberpunk into the mainstream during the late 1990s, when the genre was already almost dead in Sci-Fi literature, and spawned a multitude of movies (e.g. The One) and video games (e.g. Max Payne) which mostly imitated its cinematic style and Bullet Time CGI effects.
• Most Cyberpunk movies owe debts of gratitude to Blade Runner (the "real world") and TRON (cyberspace).
• Though not the first slasher film, Halloween initiated the 1980s' slasher craze, starting with the obvious imitator Friday the 13th (1980). Later, Scream re-invigorated the genre by referencing other horror films and winking at the conventions of the horror genre; among the works that came in its wake were Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, Urban Legend, Valentine, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Freddy vs. Jason.
• Jaws began the concept of the Summer Blockbuster, along with a slew of "animals attack" movies; one of the best copiers was Alligator. One of these films, Piranha, inspired few followers of its own in form of Barracuda and Killer Fish.
• Dolls (1987) and Child's Play jumpstarted the "Killer Doll" horror sub-genre.
• Spielberg's first movie Duel, while not as influential, inspired a few rip-offs of its own; the video release Joy Ride: Dead Ahead was painfully blatant in its copying.
• The twin successes of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter led to more and more film adaptations of epic literary fantasy, varying from the relatively successful The Chronicles of Narnia movies, to Eragon, which was a Franchise Killer. The Golden Compass (based on His Dark Materials) and The Seeker (based on The Dark is Rising) were also released, but neither did very well. The increased appetite for epic fantasy helped Alice in Wonderland (2010) turn a surrealist parody of Victorian society and literature into a straightforward fantasy epic. It also helped get Game of Thrones greenlit, which itself launched a legion of imitators on the big and small screens.
• The nature documentary March of the Penguins led to two animated features with penguin characters: Happy Feet and Surf's Up. Both were in production long before March of the Penguins was released (that being the nature of feature quality animation of either kind), but the success of March probably got them slightly more publicity for getting on the "penguin bandwagon."
• If The Matrix was the Follow the Leader of the late '90s / early 2000's, then Die Hard was the Follow the Leader of the '80s. The success of Die Hard prompted a slew of action set pieces best described as "Die Hard" on an X. Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege, Speed 2: Cruise Control), Die Hard on a plane (Passenger 57, Executive Decision, Air Force One) and so on.
• There was a genre (Our Man Flint, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Modesty Blaise, Austin Powers, Spy Hard, Johnny English, etc.) parodying spy movies in and / or of the 1960's... Except that they only ever seem to parody James Bond. It's as if other spy fiction simply didn't exist, although they don't really need to parody those: The general public know about James Bond most and the Bond movies created or standardised enough tropes by themselves. What made it rather odd is the James Bond series already started out pretty tongue in cheek.
• A shift in the spy genre occurred in 2002 with the sleeper hit The Bourne Identity. Its success while using a gritty and grounded in reality approach to espionage, combined with the critical failure of Die Another Day, resulted in a reboot for the Bond films, with a back to basics approach and Bond relying more on his fists than his gadgets.
• Shaft became the model of a film genre for movies targeted towards urban African Americans now otherwise known as Blaxploitation. It also owed a lot to Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which wasn't quite an exploitation film.
• Jacques-Yves Cousteau's The Silent World became the nature documentary all other nature documentaries would imitate.
• Superman: The Movie in 1978 and Batman in 1989 started the trend of Super Hero inspired live-action.
• The back-to-back successes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Batman (1989) in particular kickstarted a brief wave of films inspired by old school, 1930s and '40s pulp and newspaper heroes (or pastiches of old-school pulp and newspaper heroes), such as Dick Tracy, The Shadow, The Phantom and The Rocketeer. It intersected neatly with the brief revivals of swing music and WW2 films in the 90s.
• The success of X-Men, followed by the great success of the Spider-Man Trilogy, unleashed a deluge of modern Super Hero inspired live-action like Daredevil and Batman Begins.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy: The success of the films helped encourage fantastical genre films, particularly those based on comics, eschewing campiness for a grittier, more grounded and serious tone. Jon Favreau explicitly stated that Nolan's Batman Begins was a major influence on Iron Man and consequently the whole MCU. Man of Steel also follows the precedent. Dredd and Fantastic Four (2015) are others.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • The creation of a "cinematic universe" sent shockwaves through Hollywood, and every major studio was desperate to create their own:
    • The most obvious is competing comics publisher DC launching their own DCU.
    • Sony was moving forward with Venom and Sinister Six spin-offs of The Amazing Spider-Man Series (before the franchise was cancelled),
    • The Crisis Crossover and huge cast of X-Men: Days of Future Past were conceived in direct response to the success of The Avengers.
    • There were attempts to create King Arthur and Robin Hood-based shared-universe franchises.
    • Universal made an attempt to spin its Universal monster movies into Dark Universe, which quickly collapsed.
    • Star Wars also piggy-backed on the Extended Universe with The Force Awakens starting not only another trilogy, but various other spin-off films focusing on the Rebel Alliance, Han Solo, etc. The MonsterVerse is another interesting example as it too is a shared universe that came about following the Avengers, but much like the Dark Universe, the Toho movies it's based on became their own Shared Universe with the release of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. And in addition Godzilla wasn't made with sequels in mind and the proceeding movies only came about after Toho explicitly gave Legendary permission to use other classic Kaiju following Godzilla's success.
  • Even before attempting to ape the cinematic universe angle, X-Men: First Class was the first X-Men film made after the Marvel Cinematic Universe really began to take off, and it's closer to MCU films in tone and visual style than the other X-Men films.
  • The massive success of Kendrick Lamar's Black Panther (2018) soundtrack (including the Oscar-nominated hit "All the Stars") has given rise to a new wave of superhero movies that have accompanying rap songs, such as Eminem's "Venom" for the film of the same name, Post Malone's "Sunflower" for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Pitbull's "Ocean to Ocean" for Aquaman and the Megan Thee Stallion / Normani collaboration "Diamonds" for Birds of Prey (2020).
• Star Wars:
  • The film is credited with paving the way for a focus in Hollywood on "blockbusters."
  • Star Wars is also the reason that Moonraker was made when it was. Originally (in 1977) the next James Bond movie after The Spy Who Loved Me was supposed to be For Your Eyes Only, and indeed the closing credits of the former explicitly state this. The success of Star Wars changed this, and the 'spacey' movie was made. It was mediocre at best, so the next film was far more down-to-earth.
  • The films launched a whole sub-genre of obvious direct rip-offs, including: The Black Hole, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Last Starfighter, Battlestar Galactica, Turkish Star Wars, Message from Space, Starcrash, Eragon, Krull, Cosmos: War of the Planets, Battle in Interstellar Space, War of the Robots, and Star Odyssey.
  • Anime director Yoshiyuki Tomino was fascinated by the "space military" of Star Wars and created the first Gundam series in response; it can truthfully be said that the Real Robot genre might not exist today if not for Star Wars. That first series includes Laser Swords, Char Aznable's Cool Helmet that looks like a white version of Darth Vader's, and superhumanly skilled Ace Pilots with Psychic Powers including telepathy, empathy and precognition.
  • The original Star Wars film itself drew from many sources. The Hidden Fortress connection is well known. The Dune-Tatooine inspiration is pretty obvious. You can tell George Lucas must have seen at least Space Battleship Yamato episodes 26, 1, and 8, in that order, so we can probably pin his famous trip to Japan down to early 1975 when the series went into reruns. Isaac Asimov noticed some similarity to his Foundation series but didn't take it personally. As Wilson Mizner observed, stealing from everybody is just called "research."
  • The Empire Strikes Back spawned the astonishingly overused cliché of how the villain is the hero's father. The reason it worked in that film was that there was so much talk about Luke's father that the reveal was so surprising and ironic at the time. Nowadays, many writers seem to just throw it in with very little foreshadowing and buildup that it is met with little surprise at the reveal.
  • Empire also spawned some trends regarding how sequels are made. At the time, the expectation for any sequel was that it would just rehash the first film, a trend which is sadly still pretty common. Thus, it was rather shocking to have a sequel in which The Bad Guy Wins and the story concludes with a Cliffhanger. Nowadays, it's downright expected that the second installment of any franchise will end with a cliffhanger, particularly if a third installment is guaranteed if not already put into production concurrently. It seems to be the case especially when there's an unexpected breakaway hit that shows up like A New Hope was. Such was the case with the Back to the Future, The Matrix, and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies. All of which would have a second installment that ends with the cliffhanger where one of the heroes becomes trapped and in need of rescue, as was the case with Han Solo in Empire, that the heroes try to resolve at the start of the third film. Another trend started by Empire is making the sequel Darker and Edgier in order to keep the premise fresh, which is seen in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
  • The enormous success of The Force Awakens seems to have started a mini-renaissance of "soft reboots" or "remakequels" of many Hollywood franchises that haven't had sequels in decades or more. The new film often retreads the plot of the original, with new characters in the main roles and usually at least one of the original stars in supporting roles, like Blade Runner 2049, Halloween (2018), Mary Poppins Returns (with a cameo from Dick Van Dyke), Jurassic World (with a cameo from Jeff Goldblum in the sequel), Neill Blomkamp's sadly-cancelled Aliens sequel, Terminator: Dark Fate, and a currently-gestating new Conan movie, among multiple others on the way.
• Top Gun led to several imitators, like short-lived TV series Supercarrier and long-lived TV series JAG. It also resulted in a mini-boom of air-combat video games.
• The Disaster Movie craze in the 1970s featured such works as The Towering Inferno, The China Syndrome, and Airport. This only ended with the release of Airplane!, a parody that meant such films couldn't be taken seriously anymore. (That's how you know your parody was successful... when you kill your entire targeted genre.) The Disaster Movie craze made a brief comeback with Twister, Armageddon (1998)/Deep Impact and Volcano/Dante's Peak, and a whole slew of mediocre Syfy movies about earthquakes and volcanoes and killer storms in unlikely or odd locations.
• Gladiator restarted the Sword and Sandal genre, which had included movies like Ben-Hur (1959). Russell Crowe's powerful performance, the high budget settings, and gritty action caught something in the audience that studios have attempted to imitate with films such as Troy, King Arthur (2004), Alexander, and most iconic of them all, 300. From there inspired by the success of 300 this lineage would carry onto more hyper-stylized and overtly-fantastical entries like the Clash of the Titans (2010) remake and its sequel Wrath of the Titans, Immortals, two Hercules films released in 2014 (The Legend of Hercules and Hercules (2014)), as well as its own follow-up 300: Rise of an Empire. Even if they weren't set during the time of antiquity director Ridley Scott himself would attempt to recapture the magic with films like Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood (2010), and Exodus: Gods and Kings whilst also being a producer on a film version of Tristan and Isolde directed by Kevin Reynolds. Though none of them managed to attain the same level of success or popularity. While not as widely known, expensively produced, or successful the reverberations of what Gladiator started can be still felt in some Roman films, most of which are set in Britain for some reason, like The Last Legion, Centurion, The Eagle (2011), and Pompeii. As well as ones not in antiquity like the Medieval set Ironclad and its sequel Ironclad: Battle for Blood. Most recently was the newest big-screen iteration of Ben-Hur (2016); however, its failure at the box office does not bode well for the genre at present.
  • While obviously different, other historical epic films like Gangs of New York, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, The Last Samurai, Apocalypto, The Four Feathers, and The Alamo also owe a lot to Gladiator. Both stylistically and in getting the execs to actually greenlight the massive budgets they needed. Some of these have garnered successes in their own light, not as imitations but as part as a new wave of Epic films.
• Before Gladiator brought back Sword and Sandal epics set in antiquity, several medieval, Renaissance, and/or simple "swashbuckler" period adventure movies were made in the Nineties in the wake of the major hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991. The most obviously derivative is the 1993 version of The Three Musketeers - both movies have a similar light tone, a Laughably Evil Large Ham of a villain, major liberties taken with both the source material and historical setting, a score by Michael Kamen, an Award-Bait Song by the same artist (plus two others later), and even Michael Wincott playing the top henchman. 1995's First Knight continued the trend with a new take on the King Arthur legend, with Sean Connery as the king (he had a cameo in Prince of Thieves as King Richard). 1995 also saw the release of two such films about heroic Scottish rebels fighting the English. There was Rob Roy which while not a box office titan received a mostly positive reception as well as a respectable cult following, and then there was Braveheart which was the biggest historical adventure epic in recent memory before Gladiator. And notably both won five Oscars in their time. Dragonheart in 1996 was a medieval fantasy with Sean Connery as a dragon. The Man in the Iron Mask in 1998 featured older versions of the characters from The Three Musketeers (but is not otherwise related to the 1993 movie) and was directed and written by the writer of Braveheart. '98 also saw the release of another new-spin on a classic swashbuckling story with The Mask of Zorro which's own success got it a sequel in 2005 entitled The Legend of Zorro and inspired the making of a new film version of The Count of Monte Cristo directed by Kevin Reynolds, the director of Prince of Thieves himself. Following on from Braveheart would be darker and grittier historical films, basically with the emphasis being more on "epic" than "swashbuckler". Including the likes of another Middle Ages film about a commoner turned military leader and war hero who gets executed with The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc in 1999 as well as The Patriot in 2000 which also starred Mel Gibson as a man who has to go to war for independence against the English after his family is attacked by its soldiers. Gladiator itself, also released in 2000, looks to be a part of that group that owed the success of Braveheart for getting made. Complete with also being the story of a family-minded hero who just wants to live the simple life as a farmer who is forced into battle after those he loves are killed by soldiers in the service of a corrupt ruler. Which would make this all really one giant evolving trend of costume drama/adventure films over the span of several years.
• Soft on Demand, a somewhat infamous Japanese adult video company, created a small series of films called Zenra -X-, where Zenra is the Japanese word for Nude, and -X- is some random everyday activity or sport: for example, Zenra Volleyball, Zenra Cross-town Bus Tour, Zenra Officework, Zenra Orchestra, etc. These films were successful enough and mimicked enough that Zenra has become a genre of Japanese pornography, dedicated to pointless nudity, with little to no sex, and occasional plots. It helps that the Soft on Demand company doesn't take itself at all seriously.
• George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) started the trend, which was then unofficially spun off with The Return of the Living Dead which then opened the floodgates to the Zombie Apocalypse genre. There had been previous zombie films like I Walked with a Zombie, White Zombie, and arguably The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but these had only one or two zombies each, and no apocalypse. In fact those were Voodoo Zombie movies, which is what "zombie" originally meant in mythology and pop culture — Romero invented a completely new type of zombie for his movie.
  • Except for Invisible Invaders, which does feature a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Night of the Living Dead (1968) may have been the first real zombie film, but there were only a few imitators after it, like Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things and the Spanish Tombs of the Blind Dead series. What really set off the zombie film craze was the release of Romero's later Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the Italian-made Zombi 2 (Dawn of the Dead was called Zombi in Italy).
• There had been sketch movies before The Kentucky Fried Movie in The '70s, such as The Groove Tube, but it was Kentucky that was a big enough hit to inspired a host of largely forgettable films that consisted of largely unrelated sketches made up mostly of pop culture parodies and pastiches.
  • The first Scary Movie led to a couple of crappy spoof flicks by Seltzer and Friedberg such as Date Movie and Epic Movie.
• The success of the Saw franchise (at least the first movie) sparked a rash of torture horror movies, such as Hostel, Turistas, and Vacancy.
• Syfy has a tendency to release a cheap knockoff version of whatever hot movie is in theaters.
• Following the blockbuster success of Titanic (1997), several other movies were made about the Titanic and shipwrecks in general to try to follow in its footsteps. Including two separate atrocious Disneyesque cheapass cartoon movies with singing animals. Which just goes to show, some people will try to Disneyfy anything. Pearl Harbor was also a pretty blatant attempt to recapture the tragic-love-amid-larger-historical-tragedy magic that made Titanic (1997) so many gazillions.
• Pearl Harbor was also part of a glut of World War II films released after the success of Saving Private Ryan, including Enemy at the Gates, Hart's War, The Great Raid, U571, Windtalkers and others. This even crossed over into video games, with Medal of Honor being directly inspired by Saving Private Ryan. The creators of Saving Private Ryan themselves would go on to create Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and a third series currently in the works about the 8th Air Force. It also paved the way for more realistically violent but not irreverent war films set in other periods like Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers.
• And after Black Hawk Down itself a number of films about conflict in modern Africa were made including Tears of the Sun, Hotel Rwanda, and Blood Diamond.
• Alien has had a lot of "More Teeth than the Osmond Family" monster movies after it.
  • Then again, it's unlikely that Alien would have been fast-tracked into production if not for the success of Star Wars, proving that this trope isn't necessarily a bad thing.
  • It also repopularized the Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong, which would often be done in a more literal way.
  • The Nostromo's set design also heavily influenced SF movies and TV series with grungy, industrial Used Future settings: Outland and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (both directed by Peter Hyams), Saturn 3, the Vogon ship in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) TV series, Aliens (not surprising, being a sequel), Red Dwarf after the first two seasons, the interiors of Borg ships in Star Trek, Event Horizon, and the first Cube movie.
• M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense inspired many movies that completely ignored quality, fun, action, and plot, instead focusing on some supernatural twist. They ranged from good to bad to terrible. Unusually, Shyamalan himself seems to have been the main exponent of this trend.
• A wave of Japanese horror movie remakes began with The Ring. Examples include The Ring Two, The Grudge 1 and 2, and One Missed Call. Shutter even tries to look like a Japanese remake (the original was Thai, by the way).
• After films like Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and especially The Sound of Music hit the big time at the mid-1960s box-office, big studios fast-tracked a ton of big-budget movie musicals. While one, Oliver!, was successful enough to win the 1968 Best Picture Oscar, and Funny Girl launched Barbra Streisand's movie career, changing audience tastes doomed the vast majority of them to significant financial losses. The genre limped through the 1970s and quietly died in the early 1980s (with a mini-revival by way of the Disney Animated Canon in the '90s).
  • Moulin Rouge! (2001) revived this trend, making way for films such as Chicago, RENT, Across the Universe (2007), Mamma Mia!, Nine (Musical) and La La Land.
• The success of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction led to a glut of similarly stylistic and flashy Crime Dramas in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Emulated features including nonlinear timelines, amoral-yet-cool gangsters, gritty violence mixed with humor, and snappy dialogue about seemingly trivial subjects. Films include Two Days In The Valley, Suicide Kings, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch., and Lucky Number Slevin.
• Nearly all Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever movies can trace their lineage to one or more of a trio of extremely influential films:
  • Willis O'Brien's 1925 version of The Lost World invented the notion of a giant monster rampaging through a city, which O'Brien later did again with King Kong (1933). The Japanese Gojira and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, with effects by O'Brien's protege, Ray Harryhausen, took the next step by linking the monster to the nuclear bomb.
  • Them!, in 1954, was a huge hit, adding the final touch of casting giant insects as the menace, leading to a wave of imitators all throughout The '50s such as Beginning of the End, Tarantula!, The Black Scorpion, The Deadly Mantis, and Earth vs. the Spider. Its influence can be traced through its imitators in more than just the obvious giant creatures. Its Police Procedural/pseudo-documentary style was also widely imitated, as were even minor tropes, like giving the female lead a gender concealing introduction.
  • The success of Japan's Godzilla franchise led to many different monster movies all across Asia, including Pulgasari (an obscure North Korean film about a monster made of rice that comes to life and eats metal commissioned by none other than Kim Jong-Il himself), Yongary: Monster from the Deep, Gorgo (which was actually made in Britain and featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000), Gappa, Reptilicus (probably the only Danish kaiju film and also featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000), The X From Outer Space, and everyone's favorite flying turtle. The genre was recently started up again with Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005), and subsequently revamped with South Korea's The Host (2006), which was followed by Cloverfield.
  • The release of King Kong (1976) (itself following in the wake of "animal attack" movies spawned by Jaws) led to a small string of poor-quality imitators, such as the South Korean film A*P*E (even featuring the tagline "NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH KING KONG"), the British Gender Flipped parody Queen Kong, and the Hong Kong production The Mighty Peking Man.
• The smashing successes of The Flintstones and Casper led to a string of live-action adaptations based on older cartoons well into The New '10s, such as George of the Jungle, Mr. Magoo, Inspector Gadget (1999), Dudley Do-Right, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Josie and the Pussycats, Scooby-Doo (2002), Garfield, Fat Albert, Underdog, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Marmaduke, Yogi Bear, and The Smurfs, nearly all of which were met with a polarizing response at best from general audiences and became punchlines for critics and cartoon fans.
• The success of Transformers (2007) caused studios to greenlight Remake and Revival projects from older series such as Speed Racer, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, G.I. Joe, Robotech, Voltron, and Knight Rider. Star Trek (2009) is also a part of this trend, "rebooting" the Original Series with a style and mood more reminiscent of the "Revival" flicks than other films in the Trek franchise.
• The Mockbusters. Most notably The Asylum's productions. King of the Lost World is a particularly notable knock-off of King Kong (2005), Lost, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (and/or The Lost World). Notably BAD. And when Terminator Salvation came out, they released a movie called... The Terminators.
• The massive success of Shaun of the Dead has led other films, such as Fido, Severance (2006) and Lesbian Vampire Killers, to try and mix comedy and horror. Quality ranges from alright to bad. But one thing is certain: all of these films will be promoted as the best comedy horror since Shaun of the Dead.
• On a similar note, Zombieland becoming the highest-grossing zombie movie at the time naturally greenlit several zombie comedies in the following years riding on its success such as Cockneys vs. Zombies, Warm Bodies, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Burying the Ex, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, Cooties, Freaks of Nature, Life After Beth, Anna and the Apocalypse, The Dead Don't Die, Little Monsters (2019) and along with the popular The Walking Dead TV show really cemented the "Zombie Craze" of the 2010s.
• The massive popularity of Bruce Lee after his tragic passing led to a peculiar phenomenon known as "Brucesploitation", in which various Hong Kong studios made movies starring Bruce Lee imitators with titles like Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave and The Clones of Bruce Lee. The fad eventually died out when none of the imitators were as successful as the original, though one of them, Cheng Long, would later go on to greater fame by pioneering his own unique, often-imitated, never-duplicated style of martial arts film. You might know him as Jackie Chan.
  • The martial arts tournament plot seen in Fighting Games, Fighting Series, and other works the world over owes quite a lot to Lee's most successful film, Enter the Dragon.
• After The Exorcist made boatloads of money for Warner Bros., the rest of the '70s saw a veritable flood of horror movies based around children: The Omen (1976), The Other, Audrey Rose, etc. Many of its successors (such as The Sentinel (1977)) also chose to imitate its preoccupation with the symbolism and aesthetics of the Catholic church, as opposed to the scary-little-kid formula; in fact, any horror movie over the last forty or so years that relies heavily on Catholic iconography could be said to be following in The Exorcist's footsteps.
• Imitators of 2001: A Space Odyssey: the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh adaptations of Solaris, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Contact, Mission to Mars, Sunshine, WALL•E, Moon, Interstellar. However, 2001's sequel 2010 tried to avoid imitating it as much as possible.
  • Star Wars is as far away from an imitator of 2001 as you can get, but John Dykstra continued to use 2001's style of lighting and detailing spacecraft on Star Wars, and from there it became the standard way to depict spacecraft in all of visual science fiction.
• Star Trek and Lost in Space both trod heavily, in their different ways, in the footsteps of Forbidden Planet.
• It can't be a coincidence that Doctor Who debuted on TV only a couple of years after George Pal's film version of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine won an Oscar!
• The 2005 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie vehicle Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) jump-started a series of "my loved one is a secret agent and/or assassin" films. These were preceded in the '90s by True Lies (James Cameron directs Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eliza Dushku, amongst others), which itself is an English remake of the French comedy La totale, and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
• Every few years or so, when a movie shown in 3D becomes a hit, many movies after that will premiere in 3D. The most recent example is Avatar. Quality varies on these films. Some movies will be truly enhanced by 3D, others will look nice but can do without it, and others just don't work in 3D. Avatar, which started the latest 3D movement, was considered by many to look better in 3D. The film version of How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind were considered by some critics, notably Roger Ebert, to look nice, but could work just fine without it. And rushed 3D conversions to cash in this trope (3D tickets are more expensive and thus profitable), such as Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender, weren't well-received, with the latter even receiving complaints that the botched 3D only made a bad movie worse.
• Little Miss Badass: Started with Hitgirl in Kick-Ass, grew up a bit for Sucker Punch, and becomes particularly lethal in Hanna. And then there's Katniss from The Hunger Games.
• In the wake of the mega-grossing Alice in Wonderland (2010) and to a lesser extent the success of Wicked (both book and stage musical), a glut of Fairy Tale-based film projects were greenlit in The New '10s often with a Darker and Edgier take promised.
  • There's two versions of Snow White! Mirror, Mirror and Snow White & the Huntsman.
  • Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters was released in 2013.
  • This might have also caused the creation of the TV shows Grimm and Once Upon a Time, and several pilots based on variants of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, though only Emerald City was actually produced.
  • Disney, which produced Alice, has been playing with material they've previously adapted into the Disney Animated Canon in various media. The canon gets a Perspective Flip in the A Tale of... novels, and on the big screen Sleeping Beauty was rethought as Maleficent. A new live-action adaptation of Cinderella came out in 2015, starting a run of straight remakes of previous animated films. Moving beyond their canon, they also came up with a prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with Oz the Great and Powerful.
• Does anyone get the sense that The Three Musketeers (2011) is trying to rip off Pirates of the Caribbean? Swashbuckling, political intrigues, naval combat (grafted on to Musketeers by adding airships), and Orlando Bloom?
  • More like POTC meets [insert Milia Jovovich action film here].
  • While it isn't necessarily the case, the marketing of The Lone Ranger makes it come across as such, promoting the film as from the same people as Pirates of the Caribbean and showing off Johnny Depp as the deuteragonist. Clearly, Disney attempted to catch that same magic. It didn't work.
• The success of Sherlock Holmes (2009) (which might've been preceded by From Hell) led to similar steampunk-ish disturbed detective works like The Raven (2012) where Edgar Allan Poe himself helps solve murders based on his stories, and a version of Robin Hood where the sheriff of Nottingham is pursuing a murderous archer he discovers that Robin was framed and the two bring down the real murderer. Unfortunately that story was too different and what we got was Ridley Scott's Robin Hood.
• Love Actually -> Valentine's Day -> New Year's Eve. Love Actually is a British Romantic Comedy with an all star ensemble cast about the intersecting stories of various couples in love in the run up to Christmas. Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve the same thing, only titled after a holiday and with a lot more A-list stars.
• The success of the Twilight films spawned a number of paranormal teen romances, including a reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood, a film version of I Am Number Four, and The Wolfman (2010). Beastly's film adaptation was also noted to be heavily inspired by Twilight.
  • It may have also helped bring The Hunger Games to the silver screen as that series was endorsed by Stephenie Meyer.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides features an interspecies romance that features several close-ups of long, lingering gazes reminiscent of the Twilight films.
  • Once the last Twilight film was released, studios have sought to fill the void of "teen paranormal romance" films. This has led to the film versions of Warm Bodies, The Mortal Instruments, Beautiful Creatures and Vampire Academy.
• The success of The Notebook led to many more romantic movies about The Power of Love, most of them also based on books by Nicholas Sparks.
• The 1994 movie Camp Nowhere follows the Summer Campy formula of Meatballs, as well as the then-recent success of the "unsupervised children" genre invented by the Home Alone franchise. Likewise, the 1995 movie Heavyweights followed in the footsteps of both Camp Nowhere and Meatballs.
• After Project X (2012) came out, real-life teens spread the news about their own Project X parties on social networking sites, with over 2000 people showing up to most of them. Two of these parties ended in violent shootings. Oddly enough, one teen got a job offer out of it because of his marketing skills.
• When adapting Snow Flower and the Secret Fan to film, the writers added a 21st-century storyline to parallel the 19th-century storyline from the original novel. This was likely an attempt to emulate the success of The Joy Luck Club. They even got Wayne Wang to direct.
• Dino de Laurentiis's career as a producer, from the middle of The '70s onwards, included a lot of movies that were deliberately trying not only to follow but top the decade's blockbusters:
  • Jaws's success was the basis for three different de Laurentiis productions featuring frightening beasts: The White Buffalo (1976), King Kong (1976), and Orca: The Killer Whale (1977). Though his plans to do a crossover between the latter two films didn't come to fruition, he did make a sequel to the Kong remake in '86.
  • King of the Gypsies (1978) was his answer to The Godfather, focusing on a different kind of underworld.
  • Hurricane (1979) was an attempt to capitalize on the Disaster Movie craze.
  • Flash Gordon and Dune (1984) were his answers to Star Wars.
• The Purge: The film is quite comparable to The Strangers, Them (2006) and Vacancy, particularly with home invasions. The sequels, however, moved away from the home invasion angle and put more focus on the eponymous event, which was considered for the better.
• The runaway success of Macaulay Culkin and the Home Alone movies seemed to lead to a trend for adorably precocious child stars leading, or being heavily featured in, family-friendly (or mostly family-friendly) movies throughout The '90s. Stars like Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment gained attention for dramatic roles around the same time. It seemed to die out by the middle of the decade, at least until Hilary Duff became popular in The Oughties. Culkin's later film Getting Even with Dad was a thin-veiled re-hash of the Home Alone formula. It didn't fare so well, not least because the 14-year-old Culkin was less adorably precocious by then.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was initially going to be a single film, but it had to be split into two parts due to the length of the shooting script (nearly 5 hours long). After the two films had a combined box office intake of $2.2 billion (compared to the $1 billion a single film would have brought in), studios began to split the final films of their franchises into two parts so they could milk them for more profits. Examples that saw the light of day include Breaking Dawn, Mockingjay and Allegiant. Taken even futher with The Hobbit, which splits the book into a full trilogy of films.
  • Although the trend eventually died out, with Allegiant quickly being blamed for its end. First Allegiant - Part 1 and Allegiant - Part 2 were renamed Allegiant and Ascendant, suggesting that Ascendant would be a fully original continuation, no longer adapting from the source novels. Then, Allegiant bombed at the box office, leaving the studio trying to conclude the series either as a Made-for-TV Movie or a TV series. However, none of the original cast were contracted for that, and as negotiations dragged on, Lionsgate's rights to the franchise expired, leaving the series Cut Short. In light of that, both Avengers: Infinity War and Justice League quickly dropped "Part 1" and "Part 2" from their titles. While Infinity War and Endgame were still very much a 2-part story, Justice League was changed to be shot as a standalone movie with its sequel getting pushed back, before the sequel was eventually cancelled.
• Several crime thrillers with mentally deranged murderers were made in sixties after the success of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, including Dementia 13, Maniac, Homicidal and Paranoiac.
• The success of The Hunger Games spawned film adaptations of other Young Adult books with dystopian settings, such as Divergent and The Giver. The Giver especially is an odd case, as the book it was based on was written close to twenty years before the current glut of Young Adult dystopias and is quite different in tone and style. The film tried to copy the tone of the newer dystopias, alienating many of the novel's fans.
• The makers of the Gamera films are making their own Continuity Reboot for Gamera's Milestone Celebration in response to Godzilla (2014).
• The kung-fu/martial arts success of The Karate Kid (1984) largely led to films such as Bloodsport (and most of Jean-Claude Van Damme's work), 3 Ninjas, and Sidekicks.
• The 1990s sports movie craze came about thanks to The Mighty Ducks which led to movies with kids as managers or players in all sorts of sports: The Sandlot, Little Giants, Little Big League, Rookie of the Year, and The Big Green. One could argue that The Bad News Bears were the Trope Maker of the genre itself.
• The success of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior led to a slew of After the End movies in The '80s.
• The film adaptations of Harry Potter also kickstarted a trend of fantasy epics featuring unknown child and teen actors as the leads - with big-name actors appearing in various bit parts and cameos. The Chronicles of Narnia also made a gimmick out of name actors having small roles as insignificant magical creatures.
• Though Lone Survivor served as a forbearer, the even bigger success of American Sniper has led to Hollywood studios buying the film rights to non-fiction contemporary battlefield stories such as 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and 12 Strong.
• One of the reasons that most Godzilla fans have such a low opinion of the 1998 American remake is that it was so transparently made to cash in on the 1990s Jurassic Park craze, to the point that it resembles Jurassic Park far more than it resembles the actual Godzilla series. Instead of a plasma-breathing mutated dinosaur with a high-pitched keening roar, the Big G is a mutated iguana who looks, behaves, and sounds suspiciously like a real Tyrannosaurus rex, she gives birth to a brood of mini-Godzillas who all suspiciously resemble Velociraptors, and there are precisely zero opposing kaiju for Godzilla to fight. Instead of the gleefully pulpy science-fiction epic that was the classic Godzilla series, the remake tried to paint itself as a relatively realistic "Man vs. Nature" action thriller like Jurassic Park, but it just ended up making the story look even more ridiculous.
• Grand Hotel was a 1932 film featuring an All-Star Cast and an Ensemble Cast structure that featured several intertwining plotlines involving the guests at a luxurious hotel. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and inspired imitators using the same Ensemble Cast, multiple-plot-line structure, including Dinner at Eight (another MGM products that used some of the same actors) and The Captain Hates the Sea (a lower-budget but still entertaining film from Columbia).
• Fatal Attraction begot Basic Instinct, which itself begot Body of Evidence. Many of the same actors and actresses of the were considered for the male and female leads of the first two films, and one of the many criticisms of the third film was that it was pretty much a ripoff of the second, with its lead clearly being an Expy of its Femme Fatale (especially with its lead, Madonna having been among the actresses considered for the female lead in first two films.)
• Deadpool:
  • It was an R-rated superhero movie. It was also well-received and a box office success, which led to a bunch of superhero film directors suddenly deciding to shoot for an R rating as if that were the only reason why Deadpool was good.
  • According to director David Ayer, Deadpool was a factor in why Suicide Squad (2016) wound up being a notorious Troubled Production. Even though Suicide Squad was initially conceived, written and filmed as a Darker and Edgier action movie, Deadpool's massive success (as well as the disappointing response to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) caused the studio to Retool it into an action-comedy via reshoots and new edits.
• It seems unlikely that Interstellar and The Martian would have been greenlit if Gravity hadn't been an unexpected hit.
• William Goldman referred to two specific films, Easy Rider and Charade, as "money losers," not so much because the films themselves were flops, but because the imitators that came in the wake of these respective films cost Hollywood millions of dollars. Goldman has had some experience with this trope himself, as he wrote the 1992 bomb Year of the Comet, which like Charade, was a romantic comedy/thriller with a male lead inspired by Cary Grant.
• God's Not Dead inspired not only a sequel but a slew of Christian films that starred a B-list actor, took place in a college environment, and had an atheist villain.
• The success of Clueless - a Setting Update of Emma set in a modern high school - caused a surge of other films doing the same with classical works of literature:
  • Cruel Intentions -> Dangerous Liaisons.
  • 10 Things I Hate About You -> The Taming of the Shrew.
  • Get Over It -> A Midsummer Night's Dream.
  • She's All That -> Pygmalion.
  • "O" -> Othello.
  • Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet received their own updates, but keeping the original title and most of the text intact.
  • Examples that came along a few years later after the craze had died down - She's the Man (Twelfth Night), Easy A (The Scarlet Letter).
  • The Faculty is a related example. While not an adaptation or Setting Update, it's a Whole-Plot Reference to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
• While Ghostbusters (2016) was not a commercial success, the film's publicity surrounding its Gender Flip twist might have inspired more remakes taking advantage of this trope. Currently, there are plans for a remake of Splash with Channing Tatum as a merman, and a Lord of the Flies with girls. Overboard with Eugenio Derbez as the spoiled socialite and Anna Faris as the working-class single parent and Ocean's Eight (all-female spies) arrived in 2018, and What Men Want flipped What Women Want the following year.
• Of course, Ghostbusters (1984) was so popular that it inspired a wave of comedies with paranormal/horror underpinnings for the rest of the 1980s. These included Teen Wolf, Transylvania 6-5000, Once Bitten, Haunted Honeymoon, Vamp, The Monster Squad (also a variant on The Goonies), Ghost Fever, My Demon Lover, Beetlejuice, Vibes (also one of several Romancing the Stone wannabes), Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, High Spirits, and Scrooged. Looser successors include the film adaptation of Howard the Duck (which has a similar antagonist and stakes by the end) and The Lost Boys (which has a lot of humor).
• Lawrence of Arabia was so influential in its day that practically every movie set in whole or in part in a desert since it came out has effectively borrowed or outright stolen from it. Echoes of Maurice Jarre's iconic sweeping score can be heard in everything from Stargate to the Brendan Fraser The Mummy Trilogy movies.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was the biggest movie of The '80s, and came along early in the decade (June 1982). As a result, the concept of a fantastical, kindly being ending up among humans took off big time. Like E.T. these protagonists learn about Earth culture (sometimes via TV), use their abilities to help and befriend others (especially children), and/or need protection from cold-hearted souls who would cut them up. These variations on a theme by Spielberg were so many — he even produced some of them via Amblin Entertainment — that they could be divided into distinct sub-categories:
  • The blatant ripoffs in which the alien is usually an attempt at Ugly Cute: Pod People, The Aurora Encounter, Nukie, Hypersapien: People from Another Star, Mac and Me, Purple People Eater, etc. The most successful of these knockoffs was actually the TV show ALF, which rethought the premise as a Sitcom. (Disney tried their hand at an animated variant with Fluppy Dogs, but that didn't get beyond the pilot stage.)
  • Looser variants: Short Circuit and D.A.R.Y.L. (military robots acquire sentience and defy their programming in favor of peace), The Brother from Another Planet, Ratboy, and *batteries not included (aliens/mutant in a depressed urban setting), Cocoon (aliens befriend senior citizens), Howard the Duck (alien duck in Cleveland helps save the world), Solarbabies (kids and a mystical being in a knockoff of The Road Warrior's setting!), Project X (youth rescues lab chimpanzees from the U.S. Air Force), Harry and the Hendersons (Bigfoot befriends a family), The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (possibly alien, definitely gross tykes befriend an adolescent), Edward Scissorhands (android in suburbia), and Free Willy (youth rescues orca from a marine park) — and this is just stopping at the early 1990s.
  • Gremlins is an E.T. story rethought as a horror / Black Comedy hybrid — and spawned (so to speak!) quite a few imitators of its own: Ghoulies, Critters, Munchies, Hobgoblins, etc.
  • The kids travel to and/or with aliens: Explorers and Flight of the Navigator. See also SpaceCamp, which sends kids into space thanks to a cute robot on Earth, and Space Raiders, where a kid stows away with, in effect, a bunch of Han Solos.
  • Romantic Comedy variations in which the otherworldly being and a human fall in love: Voyage of the Rock Aliens, Splash (mermaid), Mannequin (which is actually an enchanted woman), Making Mr. Right (android), Date with an Angel (self-explanatory), Earth Girls Are Easy (alien), and My Stepmother Is an Alien. Starman (alien) is a Played for Drama version that not only had a followup TV series but inspired two Pilot Movie attempts at imitation shows (Starcrossed and a TV version of the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth). Disney's The Little Mermaid, released in 1989, has a good deal in common with these films but as an animated Fairy Tale gives the point of view to the title character rather than the human.
• In 2019, the 2008 novel The Art of Racing in the Rain was given a Live-Action Adaptation after the success of the film adaptations of the W. Bruce Cameron books A Dog's Purpose, A Dog's Journey, and A Dog's Way Home. They're all dog-centric Coming of Age Stories from a dog's POV.
• 1981 saw the one-two punch of An American Werewolf in London and The Howling bring the state-of-the-art makeup effects that slasher films and sci-fi movies were already using to werewolves, resulting in truly convincing and exciting transformations. Combine that with the Canadian B-picture Scanners being a hit that same year, and the result was both a new wave of monster movies that often were sold on Transformation Sequences and the formal arrival of the Body Horror genre on film — trends best reflected in a run of remakes/alternative adaptations of 1930s-50s sci-fi/horror films. These included Cat People, The Thing, The Fly, and The Blob.
• The Thin Man, which took a hardboiled Dashiell Hammett detective novel and mashed that story up with Screwball Comedy involving a droll detective and his wisecracking wife, inspired a lot of imitators. There was the 1930s-40s Perry Mason film series, which attempted to do the same with the Perry Mason novels. There was Satan Met a Lady, which attempted to do the same with a different Dashiell Hammett novel, The Maltese Falcon; the result was a much Denser and Wackier film than the 1941 adaptation with Humphrey Bogart. One imitator, Star of Midnight, even had William Powell, but with Ginger Rogers as his wisecracking girlfriend instead of Myrna Loy.
• Kung Fury has been accused of ripping off the cult TV series Danger 5, particularly its second season. This goes beyond broad strokes like an over-the-top troperiffic 1980s setting and into weirdly specific details, like making Hitler the villain despite him having nothing to do with that era, and a very specific gag with bullets traveling through a phone line.
• When it was first released in late 2014, the first John Wick received high praise from critics and audiences alike for Keanu Reeves's titular performance, the deep Worldbuilding, and especially the highly stylized but realistic action sequences, which forgo Jitter Cam and rapid-fire editing in favor of a series of epic long tracking shots and stunning choreography performed by Reeves himself. Since then, the influence of John Wick could felt throughout the industry.
  • The aforementioned action sequences that refrained from the overuse of quick cuts and editing while also maintaining a stylish and/or realistic feel has inspired many actors and actresses to endure the training processes and bring more authenticity to their roles. Examples include Atomic Blonde starring Charlize Theron, The Villainess, Deadpool 2, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Extraction starring Chris Hemsworth, and The Old Guard. In fact, for Extraction, director Sam Hargrave (stunt coordinator for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame) stated that the extended and highly physical action sequences for John Wick paved the way for Extraction's fight and stunt choreography.
    • This sentient has certainly been echoed in the production company behind the John Wick franchise, 87North Productions^note also known as 87Eleven Productions. Founded by David Leitch and Kelly McCormick as a partnership with Universal, the production company has worked on several films similar to John Wick with many of the actors doing many of their own stunts. Some of their productions include Nobody starring Bob Odenkirk, Kate starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Bullet Train starring Brad Pitt, and Violent Night starring David Harbour.
    • Chad Stahelski has stated the action for his upcoming Highlander reboot will be similar to John Wick, with the swords replacing the guns. He has also served as the second-unit director of Captain America: Civil War and Birds of Prey (2020) (in which he was also a stunt coordinator), and his influence could be felt throughout. On a related note, one of the main producers, Basil Iwanyk, also said that the Robin Hood (2018) reboot starring Taron Egerton was partially inspired by Wick's action, with the bow-and-arrow replacing the guns.
  • Along with the Taken franchise, John Wick has possibly repopularized the down-to-Earth concept of a highly-trained but realistic badass (possibly even older) taking on multiple enemies (sometimes in a quest for vengeance), serving as a "back-to-basics" Genre Throwback of the glory days of action movie cinema not unlike The Expendables franchise. Examples include The Equalizer and its sequel starring Denzel Washington, The Accountant (2016) starring Ben Affleck, The Foreigner (2017) starring Jackie Chan, Proud Mary starring Taraji P. Henson, Peppermint starring Jennifer Garner, Polar starring Mads Mikkelsen, Gunpowder Milkshake starring Karen Gillan, and The Protégé starring Maggie Q to name a few.
• The success of Halloween (2018) kickstarted a trend of old horror franchises getting brought back for new sequels following a similar formula (being a direct sequel to the original that ignores most or all of the prior sequels and bringing back an old protagonist, often including a Role Reprise) — e.g. Scream (2022), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), and The Exorcist: Believer. It also brought a reboot of the original Hellraiser out of Development Hell, as the rights holders only started taking the idea seriously after Halloween (2018) became a success.
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? marked the first notable time that Hollywood's former leading ladies starred in horror stories as formerly glamorous women now going mad. Imitators included Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice?, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and What's the Matter with Helen? - eventually creating the 'Psycho Biddy' subgenre. Almost all of the films were headlined by women who had been stars during The Golden Age of Hollywood - Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Shelley Winters, Debbie Reynolds, Geraldine Page, etc.
• Hollywood released a huge number of irreverent, raunchy farces in the 1979-81 period, clearly looking to replicate the huge box office of Animal House and various Mel Brooks hits.
• The 11 Commandments is sort of a French answer to Jackass (cast doing stupid and/or dangerous things and candid camera pranks for real).
• The success of The Infernal Affairs Trilogy has led to the American remake The Departed, which became successful on its own. The American remake led to the existence of İçerde, a Turkish action thriller television series. And lastly, İçerde has its own remake in the Romanian thriller Tv series called The Clan.
• Doctor in Trouble provides much broader and bluer comedy than others in the Doctor... Series in an attempt to appeal to fans of the Carry On... Series, which was at the peak of its popularity when this film was released.
• Nat Cohen's inspiration to make Up Pompeii was due to the fact he had noticed how profitable spin-off films of TV series were, most notably being jealous of how successful The Movie of Till Death Us Do Part was.

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