Older Than They Think / Film

• A common refrain nowadays is that all movies are either remakes/reboots, sequels or adaptations, and that nothing is new in Hollywood. The concept of remaking films is about as old as commercial film, with milking the same franchise as long as possible is about as old art itself. Classic films like The Wizard of Oz and Ben-Hur (1959) are both themselves remakes of silent films, not to mention each is an adaptation of popular books. TV Tropes itself has listed various franchises created as far back as The '30s:Here
• Graphic sex and violence in movies! Many think this started only when the MPAA ratings system took off in the 1960s (many point to 1966's Blow Up as the first truly raunchy mainstream movie, which killed off The Hays Code).
  • Nudity existed since the start of cinema. Eadweard Muybridge, one of the founders of the motion picture process, devoted much of his footage to showing nude males and females moving before his camera.
  • Before The Hays Code, there was a period in American cinema without organized censorship. This was The Pre-Code Era, which, while still mild by modern standards, was a lot more frank and had fewer euphemisms about "matters of the heart" than later. This was the era of Mae West and Design for Living, a film about Free Love made by Paramount Studios starring major stars of the time. Frank Borzage made films like A Farewell to Arms, Man's Castle and Little Man What Now? about unmarried couples making love and cohabiting outside marriage and openly stating that Sex Is Good. Man's Castle has a couple, played by Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young, skinny-dipping...made in 1933!
  • There were also independent films exhibited as road shows in this era that didn't answer to the Code. Movies like Maniac were free to indulge in nudity and sexual content that Hollywood pictures couldn't have gotten away with even before the Code. And for that matter, straight-up hardcore porn films date back at least as far as the 1910s.
  • On account of Small Reference Pools the films made in other countries usually get lost in this survey. The silent era of German cinema included movies such as Different from the Others, a pro-LGBT film with a screenplay by Magnus Hirschfield himself. Ecstasy (1933) has a topless Hedy Lamarr and is believed to be the first film to attempt to portray an orgasm onscreen. Then you had Michael (1924) by Carl Theodor Dreyer, about a love story between a male painter and his male model, presented without stereotypes. Likewise nudity, while rated, was not uncommon in French cinema of The '30s, you had topless dancers in Julien Duvivier's Un carnet de Bal, and of course, the Swedes were never as prudish, and Ingmar Bergman owed part of his popularity in the Anglophone world to that free attitude. In the UK, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was an early title that featured an actress posing nude in a brief scene.
  • As far as violence goes, movies in the late '60s like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch popularized the use of squibs and fake blood to graphically simulate gunshot wounds, but didn't invent the practice. Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda employed them first in his 1955 film A Generation, while Samuel Fuller became the first Hollywood director to use squibs in his Western Run of the Arrow two years later. That said, prior to Bonnie and Clyde, the Hays Code ensured that they were used sparingly over the following decade (perhaps most notably in the finale of The Magnificent Seven (1960), used to emphasize the shock of a major character's death), until the Code's collapse allowed later filmmakers a lot more leeway.
• It's a common joke among movie buff circles to jot down all the stuff in Citizen Kane that was done in earlier films:
  • The movie is credited for pioneering work in deep-focus cinematography, by which action in foreground, middle and background is clearly visible and scenes are arranged accordingly. You have deep focus in films like The Long Voyage Home by John Ford (shot by the same DP Gregg Toland, and indeed Ford even introduced the gimmick of sharing his director's credit with the DP that Welles repeated). Toland also used it in his films with William Wyler (such as Wuthering Heights and the film he made after Kane, The Little Foxes). And of course in France, Jean Renoir in 1939's The Rules of the Game also had pioneering deep-focus cinematography. Even in Soviet Russia in 1937 was made "The Great Citizen" about biography of a fictional political leader (although it is very subtly hinted that this is Sergei Kirov, who was killed in 1934, like the hero of the film). Others go further and note that deep-focus cinematography can be found in Erich von Stroheim's Greed, cited by Welles as one of his all-time favorite films.
  • Likewise the film is famous for its use of sound to bridge scenes, i.e. where dialogue is cut mid-sentence and continues in the next scene but in another context. Such techniques can be seen in Fritz Lang's M as can the film's complex fusion of powerful visual style with detailed editing geared to telling an entirely cinematic story.
  • The film's narrative of a corrupt businessman dying and having his rise-and-fall life narrated via flashback was preceded by a film called The Power and the Glory whose screenplay was written by Preston Sturges. Of course there it was only one narrator whereas Welles had multiple narrators, and the earlier film stresses the story's politics (with a long subplot detailing a strike by the protagonist's employees) much more than Kane does.
• Ah yes, the first tracking shot, the first moving camera take, the first long-take, and many other credited "firsts":
  • For a long time, many credited F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh for having the first tracking shots, and making extensive use of camera movements. As a point of fact, the first people to use moving cameras were none other than the Lumière brothers themselves. In many of their shorts, especially ones showing movement, they simply put the camera on a horse-cart, or a wheelbarrow, or a train or a tram and recorded movement, and staged action accordingly. So the idea of a moving camera existed right from the start.
  • The first documentary, docu-drama, first newsreel or reconstructions: nope, not Robert Flaherty...it was Georges Méliès. The father of special effects illusionist cinema was also the father of realistic Historical Fiction and documentary recreation, whose series of reconstructions by which he would recreate in meticulous detail events like the Coronation of the English King and the Dreyfus Affair to inform the public about the events.
  • The first gangster film: not The Public Enemy (1931), and certainly not The Godfather; the answer is D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley that has the Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters, real-life location shooting, and shootouts, as well as tough charismatic bad guys, made in the year of 1912, and all in less than 12 minutes.
  • Shooting on location using non-professional actors is obviously something that Italian Neorealist films like Bicycle Thieves invented. Well, except for F. W. Murnau who made Tabu in 1931, shooting on location in Tahiti with non-professionals as actors. That was of course a silent film. King Vidor shot Hallelujah! on location in the Deep South with sound in 1929, with a cast of African-Americans, several of whom had never acted before. On a related note, many credit Psycho with the first film to show a toilet, but Vidor got there first with The Crowd (although Psycho was the first to show one being flushed).
  • A few fans have credited Stanley Kubrick's The Killing for using handheld shots in 1956, but there were quite a few movies before that already had done that, namely Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men and On Dangerous Ground. The first shot recorded from a helicopter also belongs to Ray, who did that in the first scene of They Live by Night.
  • Direct Sound (sound recorded on location) was a market cornered by Jean Renoir in his very first film made in 1931 La Chienne. The Altmanesque Hyperlink Story of a movie "without main characters" was also pioneered in films like La marseillaise and The Rules of the Game (Robert Altman himself cited the latter as one of his major influences).
  • Independent films made outside the studio and showing real people was invented in the 80s with Sundance, or certainly no earlier than John Cassavetes. But independent cinema or "indies" can be seen in Josef von Sternberg's first film The Salvation Hunters made outside the system, shot largely on location, using limited resources to tell a Real Is Brown story of working people on the skids and it only found traction thanks to the fact that Sternberg knew a guy who knew the projectionist of Chaplin's private theater and impressed the Little Tramp. Likewise, as many historians noted, what we consider Hollywood was essentially an attempt by independent film-directors and film producers to escape the studio system of Thomas Edison's company to more or less Start My Own and getting as far away from Edison as possible. In course of time, these indies of course became Sell-Out and formed the Studio System.
• Experimentation with sound, color and even 3D date back to the early days of the medium; what was important was the evolution of these technologies, and the moment when they became mainstream, which is a very blurry line. Also, many young people today don't realize that there were several waves of interest for 3D movies before the current one, dating back to several decades ago.
  • Additionally, the clear glasses used for 3D screenings today are far, far older than the average moviegoer realizes. It's a common belief that, prior to Avatar, most 3D films were viewed using low-quality "anaglyph" (red and blue) glasses, but in reality clear glasses have been the main type since the first big 3D craze started in 1952. It's likely that the confusion is caused by 3D comic books in the 1950s using anaglyph glasses and many 50s films being re-released in anaglyph during the 70s, 80s and 90s.
• The idea of the Fanvid, which most people would probably suppose dates to the creation of the Internet, actually dates back all the way to 1936 and Rose Hobart, in which an artist and Rose Hobart fanboy cut down her 1931 film East of Borneo into a 19-minute short consisting solely of her scenes, slowed down to silent speed, tinted blue, and with a new and incongruous soundtrack.
• A few iconic horror franchises, such as Child's Play and Poltergeist, were remakes of Twilight Zone episodes.
• John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is a classic. It's also an adaptation of a novella called Who Goes There?. It's actually the second adaptation, with the first being the classic 50s sci-fi film The Thing from Another World. Carpenter's version is more faithful to the original.
• The saying "What is best in life?" "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!" is often attributed to Conan the Barbarian (1982), as he spoke the line in the eponymous 1982 movie. Genghis Khan supposedly originated the quote nearly 800 years earlier. However, the source it is from is unreliable, as it did not come from the only actual Mongolian source we have (the Secret History of the Mongols), and was probably made up by his enemies, seeing as how vastly different it is from his characterization in the Secret History. Nonetheless, the line was still known in the West long before Conan put on his first loincloth.
• Good Will Hunting was not the source of the phrase "How do you like them apples?" The phrase is recorded in use as early as 1910 and appears in numerous classic films. In fact, Will asking the man if he likes apples before springing the line assumes that the man is already familiar with the expression.
• When The Rocketeer was released, a newspaper review smugly informed the reader that the idea of a rocket pack was nothing new, having been used in the 1965 James Bond film, Thunderball. The fact that The Rocketeer is a specific homage to far older comics and serials (most particularly the "Commando Cody" series, whose rocket suit was nearly identical) was completely lost on the reviewer.
• Many, many movie critics seemed absolutely convinced that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the originator of the Wuxia genre, and that Iron Monkey was derivative of it. Iron Monkey was made eight years prior. Wuxia films have been around long before that, and mystic monks are nothing new to much older Asian culture and mythology.
• Several times and in several unconnected sources, the old timey map legend "Here There Be Monsters" has been attributed as a quote of Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Barbossa says it specifically to quote the well-known custom of putting "Here There Be Dragons" or more commonly "Here There Be Lions" in places where the mapmaker didn't know much about. It wouldn't make much sense unless you got the reference.
• The film The Mist (2007), based on author Stephen King's 1980 short story of the same name, has been accused of stealing elements from the video games Half-Life (1998) and Silent Hill (1999) — both of which were released almost 20 years after the short story. The original title for Half-Life, "Quiver", was in part a reference to the "Arrowhead Project" of The Mist. The tentacle monster from Half-Life is in fact a direct homage to the short story, and the game itself was partially inspired by it.
• A lot of people think that having zombies that move as fast as living humans (as opposed to classic, lumbering zombies) is something that started with 28 Days Later. But The Return of the Living Dead had fast zombies in 1985, Nightmare City was made in 1980, the very first zombie to appear in Night of the Living Dead (1968), while still somewhat lumbering, is very agile and quick on his feet, and the very first instance is the 1966 comic book The Black Smurfs.
  • Remaining in the theme of Zombie Apocalypse, the trope actually originates in Mesopotamian Mythology, where the sisters Inanna and Ereshkigal threatens to free the dead from the underworld and unleash them to devour the living in three separate occasions.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: An awful lot of quotes are attributed to Willy Wonka, most frequently "We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." Almost any catchy line usually attributed to Willy Wonka probably came from somewhere else. He's a quoter, he is. Here's a website that lists the quotes and their sources.
• Speaking of Willy Wonka, the 1971 film is often subjected to criticism that it's too surreal for its own good. Read the original book — quite a lot of the things people point to are actually original, such as the "there's no Earthly way of knowing/which direction we are going" song (though being played by Gene Wilder may or may not help).
• The Usual Suspects:
  • Many believe the phrase "round up the usual suspects" comes from the movie. In fact, the title of the film is a reference to Casablanca, which originated the phrase. The line does not even appear in The Usual Suspects.
  • "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist" does appear in the movie, but it's not original — it's a paraphrase of a much older saying.
• People use the phrase "Good Night, Sweet Prince" in reference to the 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. Some know the source material and just think that Walter's use of the line was hilarious, while others are completely oblivious to the fact that it is one of the most memorable lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
• Singin' in the Rain was made as a vehicle for the Freed and Brown songs that it contains. They predate the film by many years, with the exception of "Moses Supposes" and "Make 'em Laugh" (the latter was a rewrite of a Cole Porter song, "Be A Clown").
• Shortly before the movie Underworld (2003) was released, White Wolf Publishing, makers of the Old World of Darkness Tabletop RPG setting, sued for copyright infringement, stating the movie's setting and plot had been lifted wholesale from Nancy A. Collins' For Love Of Monsters, that quite a number of world elements in the film's setting bear resemblance to White Wolf's Old World of Darkness. However, White Wolf can't exactly claim to stand on completely original footing either, having co-opted some pretty ubiquitous mythical characters. In fact, Nightlife by Stellar Games beat them to the punch of putting Vampires and Werewolves in a Gothic Punk setting.
• The Scream series is often credited with being the first Post-Modern slasher, introducing Lampshade Hangings and Genre Savvy characters. The little-known Cult Classic There's Nothing Out There did it first. The director of Scream, Wes Craven, had himself done it before-to Freddy Krueger!-in Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
  • Popcorn, made five years before, shares many of Scream's themes and elements.
    • The Friday the 13th series had self-parody before before Scream (Part III has a character reading an issue of Fangoria magazine before her death, and Part VI had the line "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly.")
  • Also, the iconic "Ghostface mask" that The Ghostface Killer wears was first sold in costume shops in 1991, about five years before the film came out. The movie contributed so much to the mask's iconic status that it is often erroneously referred to as a "Scream mask" by trick-or-treaters who commonly buy it as a costume accessory around Halloween, mistakenly believing that the Scream films invented it.
  • The films didn't invent it, but the mask was based on Edvard Munch's series of paintings titled "The Scream", with the most recent of them being completed in 1910. It's a Scream mask alright, just a different Scream.
  • It also wasn't the first parody of the genre. Student Bodies (1981) uses the same combination of parody and Lampshade Hanging.
  • The 1987 film Return to Horror High (no, it's not a sequel) is another Post-Modern slasher film, particularly notable for how it takes place in the production of a fictional slasher film, similar to New Nightmare and Scream 3.
• I Know What You Did Last Summer is seen by some as an attempt to capitalize on the revival of the slasher genre introduced by Scream (1996), despite the fact that it was not only based on a book, but the screenplay was actually written before that of Scream (1996) (and by the same screenwriter). However, the film has very little to do with the book.
• When Cloverfield came out, a lot of people started comparing the camera style-and the entire film's nature as an Apocalyptic Log-to that of The Blair Witch Project. In reality, Cannibal Holocaust was most likely the first film to use this concept, and was followed by such films as Man Bites Dog and The Last Broadcast, the latter of which has a very similar concept to The Blair Witch Project.
• James Cameron:
  • The phrase "Hasta la vista, baby" was popularized by Jody Watley in her song, "Looking for a New Love" in 1987, four years before the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Presumably, this is why John encourages the Terminator to use the phrase.
  • The Terminator was reportedly based on two Harlan Ellison episodes of The Outer Limits (1963) called "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand" (Ellison took him to court over it). It also bears a strong resemblance to La Jetée, a French film from 1962 in which a time traveler from a post-nuclear future meets a blonde woman in our time, and then dies, just after learning that his entire existence is dependent on a predestination paradox.
  • Avatar as well — Pocahontas? Nope. FernGully: The Last Rainforest? Nope. Look a little further back, and the plot best resembles an obscure 1976 science fiction novel called The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. Ben Bova's official site also points out the similarity between Avatar and Bova's The Winds of Altair, published in 1973. And the idea of a paralyzed man "going native" while operating a cloned remote-control body to explore an alien world had been used in such stories as Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe", from 1957.
  • People who think Cameron is the first filmmaker to set a fictional love story aboard the ill-fated RMS Titanic are in for a huge reality check.
• Avatar has also been compared dismissively to Dances with Wolves, which itself owes a huge debt to older Going Native Westerns like Broken Arrow, Run of the Arrow and A Man Called Horse. Not to mention The Squaw Man, which saw its first film adaptation in 1914.
• 2007's Beowulf is often accused of plagiarizing 300, with the line "I! AM! BEOWULF!" being a bit too similiar to "THIS! IS! SPARTA!" and the line "TONIGHT! WILL BE DIFFERENT!" being rather akin to "TONIGHT! WE DINE! IN HELL!" What these people don't realize is that there's a thing called Production Lead Time. Filming of Beowulf was done long before filming of 300 began. Although it is true that these lines were in the 300 comic (and Herodotus records Leonidas saying "Tomorrow we break fast among ghosts,"), it seems doubtful that Beowulf was plagiarizing what was then an obscure Frank Miller comic, in which the lines were not delivered with any particular emphasis. Beowulf's source material is a epic poem written between the 8th and 11th century AD, while 300's is a historical battle (i.e the Battle of Thermopylae) in 480 BC.
• It's often thought the term "X Movie" as the name of a parody film was made by the creators of the Scary Movie series. Mel Brooks actually released a film in 1976 called Silent Movie. There was also the double-feature spoof Movie Movie.
  • Making a parody of a movie is even older then that, and can be traced back to the early days of film. Many of the The Three Stooges shorts are actually parodies of the popular movies of the time.
• With all the talk of bromance movies, there was a post on ROFLRAZZI naming Bill & Ted as "the original bromance." Commenters there quickly pointed out they were still about four thousand years too late. And there are plenty of others working up to Bill and Ted, too. David and Jonathan are either (somewhat extreme) bromance or out-and-out Ho Yay, depending on who you ask.
• Many people think the concept of The Men in Black originated in the movie of the same name (or the comic it's based on). It is actually a preexisting conspiracy theory, with artistic examples going back at least as far as They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, a 1956 book by Albert K. Bender purporting to be nonfiction. They also made an appearance in the 1984 film Repo Man, and previous films (such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind) included similarly silent, terse, or otherwise awkward and intimidating people in black suits.
• Many people seem to think Halloween (1978) was the Trope Maker for the slasher genre. However, Halloween was originally conceived as a sequel to Canadian horror film Black Christmas (1974). The genre as a whole can trace its origins back even further, although Halloween is often accepted at the Trope Codifier, at least.
  • Black Christmas itself (alternately titled Silent Night, Evil Night) was not even the Ur-Example of a Slasher Film with a Christmas setting featuring a mysterious killer harassing people via phone calls, as the existence of Silent Night, Bloody Night theatrically released two years earlier in 1972, and filmed in 1970, can attest (nor would it be the last Yuletide slasher movie, as the very similarly-titled 1984 film Silent Night, Deadly Night and its sequels showcase, which in turn share a very similar premise of a Bad Santa who turns to murder out of unresolved childhood trauma with 1980's Christmas Evil, even though Silent Night, Deadly Night ended up engendering far more prominent public controversy with Moral Guardians, while its first sequel achieved a more memetic status for "Garbage day!" if nothing else).
• The 1994 film of The Shadow is an adaptation of a very old character that had become obscure by the time the film came out, so this was bound to happen. Some people accused it of ripping off the Jedi Mind Trick from Star Wars, while others believed it to be a ripoff of Batman due to several concepts being similar between the two (rich playboy with a secret identity, cape-wearing dark hero stalking a city at night). The Shadow first appeared in 1930, and his characterization in the movie was codified in the 1937 Orson Welles radio program, while Batman first appeared in 1939. And the very first Batman story was in fact closely modeled on a 1936 Shadow story. The concept of a rich, masked vigilante can be traced back at least to The Scarlet Pimpernel, first published in 1905.
• Indiana Jones:
  • Some consider him to be the original Adventurer Archaeologist, even though this trope existed in multiple pulp novels and movie serials from the 1930s, including H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quartermain. Others included Professor Challenger, Harry Steele, and Sir William Rutherford.
  • Another trope from Indiana Jones that is Older Than They Think (though probably coincidentally) is its Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight scene, which is at least as old as Tchaikovsky's 1884 opera Mazeppa, in which Andrei charges Mazeppa with sabre, only to be shot by Mazeppa.
  • Imagine an Indiana Jones story that takes place after World War II, features Soviets as the bad guys instead of Nazis, incorporates science-fiction elements into its plot, and ends with the revelation that some supposedly divine beings are actually Sufficiently Advanced Aliens from Another Dimension. Are we talking about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (released in 2008), or Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (released in 1999)? Yes, it turns out that the Indy franchise was dabbling with aliens and the Cold War long before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was accused of ruining the series forever by bringing those things in.
• The Lion King (1994):
  • The opening shot of a sunset above Africa appeared seven years earlier in the opening of the Malian film Yeelen. Except Yeelen's version then cuts to a chicken being roasted alive.
  • Using the word Simba (lion in Swahili) for a lion was not first done by The Lion King; in fact it's a stock term in fictional media. For example, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! had Shaggy use the term while pretending to be a lion tamer in the episode "Bedlam In The Big Top" from November 1969.
• In Pulp Fiction, most of Jules' "Ezekiel 25:17" speech is from the Opening Scroll of The Bodyguard, the English version of Karate Kiba / Bodyguard Kiba.
• Batman's archenemy, The Joker, was most definitely not based on the poster for the film version of The Man Who Laughs, starring Conrad Veidt. In the days leading up to the release of The Dark Knight, a recoloured version came into mass Internet circulation, and was actually mistaken by many for a publicity shot of Heath Ledger's Joker makeup.
  • The Dark Knight was not the first time the Joker has used the Jerry Maguire quote "You complete me" to Batman in a romantic manner: he had previously used the line in The Batman vs. Dracula, and possibly even before that.
    • The Batman’s infamous “hobo Joker” prefigured The Dark Knight’s (much more positively received) grungy interpretation of the character. The Batman also had Joker break Reasonable Authority Figure Ethan Bennet and turn him into a supervillain before he did it to Harvey Dent.
  • At one point in The Dark Knight, the Joker kills somebody using a writing utensil. Sound familiar?
  • The Joker's parody of Friedrich Nietzsche, "What does not kill you makes you stranger" was previously used, with "us" rather than "you", by Trevor Goodchild in the first talkie episode of Æon Flux.
  • Christopher Nolan has acknowledged that he drew on The Testament of Dr. Mabuse for his characterization of the Joker. If you compare Mabuse's famous speech about using chaos to create "an Empire of Crime" and, say, the Joker's confrontation with Harvey Dent, the parallel becomes pretty obvious.
  • The Dark Knight isn't even the first film to use its opening scene as a teaser trailer. That honor goes to The Lion King, which showed Simba's christening as a four-minute teaser trailer before The Three Musketeers (1993) and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit.
• Tim Burton is a rich source for this trope.
  • To begin with, Burton's very existence as a filmmaker isn't all that original. A former animator in charge of big-budget live-action films? Sounds mind-bending...but Frank Tashlin (a former Warner Brothers animator who went on to direct some of Jerry Lewis's and Jayne Mansfield's star vehicles) was doing that a full generation before Burton came along.
  • Burton also, like Quentin Tarantino, copied many tropes and gags he had seen in the B-movies and other entertainments of his youth. Pee-wee's Big Adventure, for example, owes a great deal to classic cartoons. That "breakfast machine" that looks intricate but succeeds only in getting pancakes stuck to the ceiling? Similar machines had already appeared in the cartoons of Rube Goldberg, and to make the very same satirical point. Pee-Wee using a "three-dimensional" backdrop to trick people chasing him into running into a wall? That's from the Roadrunner cartoons. Even Pee-Wee's "I know you are, but what am I?" repartee with Francis could be considered the Spiritual Successor to the "Rabbit season!/Duck season!" exchange from Bugs Bunny cartoons.
  • In Beetlejuice, Purgatory is depicted as a massive bureaucracy, with dead souls forced to sit in waiting rooms for interminably long periods of time before being shuttled off to different departments. Sounds funny, right? Not to the ancient Chinese, whose religion literally taught this.
  • Batman Returns redesigned the Penguin to the point where many people, shown a picture of Werner Krauss's Dr. Caligari, will believe it to be the Penguin.
  • In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Halloweentown looks suspiciously similar to Holstenwall in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Edward Scissorhands Looks Like Cesare.
• Online videos of Neill Blomkamp's short film Alive in Joburg occasionally bear comments accusing it of ripping off District 9, which is extra amusing considering the latter is his own remake of the former.
• In an interview, David Cronenberg tells about showing Shivers (1975) at a German film festival during the '80s, and a man stood up and asked how dare he show so obvious an Alien ripoff, as both films are set in an isolated location (Alien on a spaceship, Shivers in an apartment complex called the Starliner Towers), and both films involve Body Horror creatures that burst out of stomachs and attach themselves to faces. Cronenberg politely explained that his film was made several years prior, and that Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon admitted to taking some inspiration from Shivers. "Ah," said the German man, "Now we know who the real thief is."
• Alien, apart from taking inspiration from Shivers, also reportedly took some thematic inspiration from Van Vogt's Black Destroyer and the alien race called the Coeurl. It is directly based on a sequence from Dark Star, written by the same author, in which an alien runs amok on a spaceship.
  • Some film scholars have pointed out that the both the plot and visual design of Alien bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Mario Bava's 1965 sci-fi/horror film Planet Of The Vampires.
    • In his negative review for The Thing (1982), Roger Ebert believed that Alien was the superior remake of The Thing from Another World (see above). Watch the films back to back and you'll see a lot of similarities: a team gets a report of a crashed ship. They bring a body into their quarters against their better judgement. They track the monster with a geiger counter. They attack the monster with fire. A scientist who risks the lives of his crewmates to protect the monster and a smart and resourceful female deuteragonist.
• "There's no place like home" is now most commonly recognized as a phrase from The Wizard of Oz. The phrase didn't originate in the film though, or even in L. Frank Baum's book (though it appears in both); it came from the 19th-century song "Home, Sweet Home", which was recognizable enough to be a Standard Snippet. In fact, said snippet is worked into the underscore in the final scene.
  • Several aspects of the Oz story are thought to be original to the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz, but are actually older. The characters being saved from the poppy field by a snowfall is actually in the 1902 stage production. Changing to Technicolor when the characters arrive in Oz was also done in a 1933 animated cartoon, although legal problems prevented the short film from being distributed with the Oz segments in Technicolor.
  • Technicolor, for that matter, was first used in 1916, though many of the earlier films to use it survive only in black-and-white if at all. "Modern" three-strip Technicolor was first used in Becky Sharp (1935); The Wizard of Oz was only the second MGM musical to use it (the first was Sweethearts).
    • An earlier experimental three-strip colour process was used in May 1913 to film the festivities at the wedding of Princess Viktoria Luise, daughter of Wilhelm II, with Prince Ernst August of Hanover. They can be seen within the 1999 German documentary film Majestät brauchen Sonne.
  • Even earlier than that, documentary footage of King George V & Queen Mary's coronation visit to India in 1912 was filmed in an early color process called Kinemacolor, in which film shot through red/orange & blue/green lenses was projected using red & green lenses; the film itself does not contain any dye, so it appears monochrome when examined.
• When the first trailers for the Get Smart movie appeared on YouTube, many of the comments accused it of being a ripoff of the 2003 film Johnny English. Never mind that Get Smart is a TV show from The '60s.
  • And never mind that the two films aren't nearly similar enough for either to be a ripoff of the other. Yes, they are both spy comedies. But all that means is they share the same subgenre. It'd be like picking two random foreign action films and saying one must be a ripoff of the other.
• The Lord of the Rings has a particularly daft section of its fanbase who, upon seeing Peter Jackson's film version of The Return of the King, believed that Jackson's Oliphaunt march had been ripped off by George Lucas for his walker attack in the film The Empire Strikes Back. This incredibly stupid group somehow convinced themselves that Lucas' film, made in 1980, copied one of its key scenes from Jackson's film, made in 2003.
  • The scenes aren't even that similar. AT-ATs and Mûmakil both have four legs. And are really big. And used by the bad guys. That's about it.
  • Word of God admits that the AT-ATs from Return of the Jedi (1983) were inspired by the three-legged walking machines from The War of the Worlds, the Novel (1889) (The first film adaptation (1953) didn't have those, they just floated on "Invisible legs". The Peter Jackson movie (2002) was an adaptation of Tolkien's book (1954) and THAT was inspired by... um... elephants?
    • Tolkien says they're the ancestors of today's elephants, who aren't nearly as huge or impressive.
    • Elephants dominating the battlefields and slowly moving towards the lines of enemy are usually the first thing associated with Hannibal Barca (III-II century B.C.). Definitely Older Than Feudalism.
    • It should be noted in passing that the AT-ATs' walking motion was directly based on the way elephants walk. (They are popularly reputed to be "the only animals with four knees", although the front "knees" are actually just knobby wrists.)
    • Both Lucas and Ben Burt have confirmed that the AT-ATs' look was inspired by Paraceratherium a giant hornless rhinoceros that went extinct 23 million years ago. So that's WAY before Tolkien, Lucas... and the modern-day elephant.
  • ''The Hobbit' confused some audience members by implying Aragorn was alive during the events of the film, a good 60-77 years before the events of LOTR. The extended edition has a scene explaining how he is a race of Men who have long lifespans, and that he is 87. So he would be around 27 (or 10 in the books) depending on how much time passes between Bilbo leaving the Shire and Gandalf returning to warn Frodo about the ring (in the books it was 17 years, in the films it isn't implied to be very long).
  • Parodied by the Cracked article "50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks", which includes complaints that the idea of orcs was obviously stolen from Warcraft, Gollum was a ripoff off Jar Jar Binks, Gandalf was a copy of Dumbledore, and the concept of a village of little people was stolen from Willow. The author concludes by shaking his head at how the greedy producers had the movie novelization released years in advance before the films.
  • In June 2012, an IMDb user by the name of brian__007 took to their forums to complain about how The Lord of the Rings ripped off Harry Potter. Hilarity Ensued among the Internet, which was quick to point out that The Lord of the Rings novels were originally published in the 1950s while Harry Potter began as novels in 1997. The original post was eventually deleted, and a sizable group eventually concluded that brian__007 was a troll.
• The 'pram bouncing down the stairs surrounded by gunfire' scene in The Untouchables was a deliberate reference to a similar scene in The Battleship Potemkin from 1925. The Untouchables wasn't even the first film to reference this; there is a brief shot of a baby carriage bouncing down some stairs during a gun battle in Woody Allen's film Bananas.
  • Also referenced in The Godfather and Brazil, among others.
• Name a movie about a burn victim, thought to be dead, who exacts his vengeance via the children of those responsible. Now name a movie about a slowly-dying man who comes up with overly elaborate deathtraps for his victims, but sometimes leaves a possible way out. Now name a movie about an extremely creative Poetic Serial Killer who takes his inspiration from a religious sequence. If you answered A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Saw, and Se7en... you're wrong (if you thought they were first). The answer to all three is The Abominable Dr. Phibes, a Vincent Price movie from 1971.
  • While it isn't a horror movie, Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) employed a similar premise way back in 1936.
• A man is drugged, and awakens in a room with a tape player. The tape informs him that there's a trap in the room, and if he tries to leave, he'll die. If he can disarm the trap within three hours, he'll be permitted to live, but if he fails, he'll die, and if he triggers it, he'll die. I think I saw that before, right? Wrong. This is the plot of the 1964 Twilight Zone episode "The Jeopardy Room", predating Saw by a full 40 years (39 if you count the short film).
• A kid's doll that comes to life and kills people. Sounds like Child's Play, right? Wrong. The Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" developed this concept a full quarter-century earlier.
• Similarly, The '80s TV special The Electric Grandmother (a fixture of the Disney Channel back in the day) was actually the second adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story "I Sing the Body Electric". The first was as an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959).
• Overhead shots of Chorus Girls linked in geometrical formations are usually identified with the work of Busby Berkeley, though they first seem to have been used by French director Robert Florey in the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts, which was filmed in 1929, before Berkeley started working in Hollywood. Audiences applauded the shot when the film was first shown.
• "Your Wolfman ripped off Twilight." ...um, ahem. The angry letter claims that the new Wolfman movie (2010) is ripping off of Twilight (2008) even though it's a remake of the original movie (1941) which drew from the common mythology of werewolves (circa 60 AD). The context of the letter strongly indicates that the writer believes Stephenie Meyer invented werewolves.
  • Speaking of Twilight, a lot of people complain about vampires being sexualized. Vampires are almost always meant to be a metaphor for sexuality, even Dracula in the 1931 movie.
• A film critic claimed (until being called on it) that Repo! The Genetic Opera was inspired by a 2009 book called Repossession Mambo. This despite the film version of Repo! The Genetic Opera being released in 2008. There was also the short-film version made in 2006. And these film versions were based on the stage musical version of Repo!, which was created in 2001. That was a union of short operettas that had been performed live in Los Angeles since the late 1990s. You can read the full story (with the pictures to prove it) HERE.
  • There was more of the same when Repo Men (which WAS based on Reposession Mambo — the author decided to make a film out of it when it was still being written) was released.
  • The producers of Repo Men did talk about doing a Repo! The Genetic Opera movie, under the condition that it wasn't a musical. The creator of Genetic Opera refused, then Repossession Mambo was written... So it probably happened the other way around what people actually think.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is accused of ripping of The Matrix simply because of an artifact called the Matrix Of Leadership. The Matrix was an artifact in the original G1 continuity, 15 years before the Matrix films were ever developed.
  • For that matter, Sam's ability to commune with the All-Spark (itself a reference to Beast Machines) calls to mind a storyline from the comic book from the 1980s.
    • The much-criticized "robot heaven" also takes cues from the various interpretations of Transformer afterlife that have been around since the original show.
  • Optimus Prime's alternate mode, much hated by some fans, and character dynamic (somewhat brusque military commander of a small team of Autobots) are far more reminiscent of Transformers: Armada than the G1 Optimus.
    • The shot of him scanning his alt mode and transforming into it is even a direct homage to the second episode of Armada.
    • His alternate mode also closely resembles Generation 2 Laser Optimus, a longnose Peterbilt that transforms into the commander of the Autobots.
  • Optimus having a mouth under a facemask has been already seen in Beast Wars from '96 and Transformers: Cybertron from '04... and in the storybook The Great Car Rally from 1984, the year in which Transformers has started, as well as in numerous comics from the '80s. Many other characters that "shouldn't" have an actual face, for instance Soundwave, have also had genuine human faces in some early media, and Bumblebee's original toy lacked a mouth, much like movie Bumblebee.
  • Optimus' updated design from Transformers: Age of Extinction lacks his signature chest cab windows, causing further complaining. Also been done before, most famously in (again) Armada.
  • The amount of people who complain that the movie designs don't look like Transformers is staggering considering that similarly over-detailed, bizarre looking and often very ugly and monstrous robot designs have been a constant part of the franchise (most famously) since Beast Wars and (perhaps more obscurely) since the tail-end of G1. Some of the characters from the original toy lineup even had to be drastically redesigned for the cartoon and comics because they looked too weird.
  • Transformers with beards, beer guts, and cigars in their mouth? All been done before, and overly "humanized" robots have in fact been one of the most discerning aspects of the entire franchise since its conception. On the other end of the spectrum, some viewers are giving the filmmakers a hard time for the inclusion of animal-inspired robots, Dinobots in particular, which have also been a staple of the brand since the beginning. In truth, the live-action movies have barely scratched the surface of the weirdness that lies within the franchise.
  • Some call out the notion of samurai Transformers, in reference to Drift's portrayal from Transformers: Age of Extinction, as a clear example of how the moviemakers keep "screwing up" the property by introducing ridiculous ideas, unaware that there have been several samurai-based robots in the earlier franchises, and that the various Transformers universes have in fact always closely paralleled all sorts of real-life Earth cultures.
  • One of the all-time biggest complaints fans have against the live-action films is how they keep drifting away from the source material, renaming characters, changing their looks, personalities, powers or backstories. In truth, the movies are not meant to be adaptations of any previous cartoon or comic series, but their own, separate universe, of which there are incredibly many already — the Transformers brand is well known for reinventing itself every couple of years, and some of the iterations have had very little to do with the original series, beyond featuring shape-shifting robots who fight. Also, even the Gen 1 cartoon and comic series have been drastically different, so a lot of characters and concepts had already started out "not being true" to themselves. In some aspects, the live-action films are actually among the most G1-faithful "reinventions" the brand has ever had.
• Many IMDb posters are annoyed that St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold is called "St. Trinian's 2" (meaning the second of the current incarnation) when it's actually the seventh St. Trinian's film overall. Although the first came out over fifty years earlier, and the fifth (The Wildcats of St. Trinian's) is so legendarily awful that it's no longer available, so ignorance is perhaps excusable.
• Despite what you may think, Speed Racer is not the first American live-action film adapted from an anime or manga series. Neither is G-Saviour, a So Bad, It's Good direct to television movie adapted from the Gundam series back in 2000. That goes to Guyver, starring Mark Hamill, adapted from the manga/anime series of the sort-of-same-name back in 1991 and still kickin'.
  • While Live-Action Adaptation of manga/anime series (either made by Japanese productions or Hollywood) can be polarizing among (North American) anime fans, especially for the younger generations (hence, the Netflix Adaptation), but keep in mind that this wasn't a recent phenomenon. As Mike Toole pointed out, adapting mangas into live-action films or television series goes way to back the genesis of anime itself. In fact, some of the early manga-to-live-action-films, such as Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood are actually good and now considered to be classic Japanese cinema (enough to get to be part of The Criterion Collection). Not only that, it often overlaps with the Japan's tokusatsu genre as some of toku materials are based of manga series as well.
• Many (though by no means all) of the elements GI Joe The Riseof Cobra is taken to task for "changing" are actually taken directly from the source material. Examples include the mechanized body armor, Destro being Scottish, the mouth on Snake-Eyes's mask, and the black machine-gunner being named Heavy Duty instead of Roadblock. The thing is, there's a lot of source material: the armor was from the G.I. Joe: Sigma 6 line; Destro has been Scottish in the comics for decades; Snake-Eyes has had more than a dozen different action figures, several of which had mouths molded into their masks; Heavy Duty's been around since 1991 (and Roadblock himself has been renamed Heavy Duty in the comics due to trademark issues). But most people are only aware of a small portion of the franchise's history (in most cases that's the 80s cartoon) and assume anything they haven't seen before is new to the movie, which (perhaps unwisely) tried to combine elements from as many different eras as possible.
• Who was the first person to say "It's a Trap!" in the Star Wars movies? First? Wasn't Admiral Ackbar in Return of the Jedi the only one who said it? Actually, it was first said by Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, as the Imperials were leading Luke Skywalker into Darth Vader's trap on Cloud City.
  • Likewise, many a fan criticized the “Holdo Maneuver” that was first shown on screen in The Last Jedi, questioning why the Rebels never thought to launch smaller ships and the Empire at light speed for such devastating results. There are a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work or at least wouldn’t be practical in universe, but there is actually an example of the Rebels trying this in the Legends continuity. In the fan favorite Star Wars: Battlefront II no less!
• At least one reviewer took Return to Oz to task, for taking Tik-Tok straight out of the Star Wars films. Tik-Tok was taken straight out of L. Frank Baum's 1907 novel Ozma of Oz, and is generally considered by literary historians to be the first depiction of a robot in modern literature ever.
  • While Tik-Tok is original to the Oz novels, E. T. A. Hoffmann had a clockwork automaton that was able to pass for human in his short story "The Sandman (1816)", which is a clear precursor to the concept of Tik-Tok, though in Hoffmann's case the character does not seem to have any intellect and only utters the phrase "Ah-ah". Oh, and the character is capable of singing and dancing quite well.
    • There have been clockwork (wind-up) toys that looked like animals, soldiers, and so forth since the Middle Ages. To imagine one that was so convincing it passed for human, or a sentient one that lived in a magical world where scarecrows and pumpkin-headed creatures could come to life is not such a big leap.
    • The Jaquet-Droz automata of the 1770s are surprisingly complex real-world examples, including a self-contained, programmable boy who can write up to 40 characters with a quill pen and ink on paper. It's amazing, even by today's standards.
  • The Overly Narrow Superlative "first depiction of a robot in modern literature" is there for a reason: fictional artificial beings, often made of metal, had been around for over 2000 years before Tik-Tok. Two prominent examples from Greek mythology are Pandora and Talos.
    • Vulcan/Hephaestus, Blacksmith of the Greek and Roman gods, was famous for making things we would consider "robotic" today, including tables and chairs that could be ordered to walk around and position themselves.
• A film uses a documentary style to cover real-life events without defined characters, dialogue, or even a 'story'. Regardless of this, it conveys a clear ideological message and manages to exhibit some impressive techniques that only film could really display in such a way. It's got to be Koyaanisqatsi and its sequels, right? Well, actually it's Dziga Vertov's 1929 Soviet Montage film Man with a Movie Camera.
  • Or is it? Maybe it's Walter Ruttmann's 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Or maybe it's Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's 1921 short Manhatta.)
• The concept of "Vamping Out" (a vampire having two forms: regular human, and vampire human) was credited by Joss Whedon as coming from The Lost Boys. However the vampire in Fright Night (1985) had the same ability (notice just how inhuman he looks after he gets stabbed in the hand by a pencil!). This may go all the way back to the Dracula novel, when Mina saw a massive figure feeding on Lucy when she finds her out on the moors, but ended up thinking it was only a trick of the shadows.
• "You talking to me? You talking to me?" Yes, Travis Bickle did the talking to the mirror bit but Jackie Rhoades did it first with those lines.
• Imagine a film in which an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, so a team is sent to drill holes and place explosives in this unwanted visitor, thus saving our planet. That description sounds like Armageddon (1998) or Deep Impact (1998), although in the latter there were differences such as a comet instead of an asteroid. These plot elements are actually much older and can be found in the 1968 film The Green Slime, while the concept of preventing a huge celestial body from colliding with Earth goes back at least as far as the 1962 Japanese film Gorath, although in this film the solution is to move the entire Earth out of the way.
• Many elements of the Star Wars Universe that are often assumed to have been invented for the prequels were actually established in books, promotional material, and other sources before the development of Episode I. These include Bail Organa, the planets Kashyyyk and Coruscant, stormtroopers being clones, Palpatine being elected after the previous chancellor was removed from office by the Galactic Senate, Palpatine later abusing emergency powers given to him during a crisis, and Anakin being grievously injured fighting Obi-Wan on a lava planet.
• Let's roll back in time with the idea of dream-hijacking popularized by Inception: prior to 2010, there was 2006's Paprika, 2005's Psychonauts, 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 2001's Kagetsu Tohya and Da Capo (minor plot device in the last one, though). It doesn't stop at that: in 2000 there was the original draft of Inception's script, the original Paprika novel in 1993 and 2 movies closely released in 1984: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Dreamscape. Now that's a long retro ride, isn't it?
  • The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Frame Of Mind" (1993).
  • And the Charmed episode "Dream Sorcerer" (1998).
  • And and that one Scrooge McDuck comic...
  • Dark City (1998).
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine also did it in "Extreme Measures" (1999).
  • The Men in Black: The Series episode "The Elle of my Dreams Syndrome" (1998)
  • And the The Prisoner (1967) episode "A. B. and C." beats all of those by a large margin.
• The premise of Trading Places, where two wealthy businessmen bet over whether heredity or environment makes a gentleman, and proving it by taking a bum off the street and making him sophisticated, was previously tackled in The Three Stooges short "Hoi Polloi".
  • which was taken from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion.
  • Trading Places also shares elements with Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper.
• Heeeere's Johnny! It wasn't intended as anything more than a Shout-Out in The Shining, but became a stolen Older Than They Think quote instead.
• The famous line "If it bleeds, we can kill it" from Predator was earlier phrased (slightly more verbosely) in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
  "If [the hound] was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him."
  • On the subject of Predator, it was far from the first film to focus on sentient aliens hunting humans for sport, with one notable antecedent for this being Without Warning (1980) released around seven years earlier (featuring Kevin Peter Hall starring as the offending extraterrestrial in both respective cases, no less).
• A YouTube comment on the Fright Night (2011) trailer: "This is just a Disturbia clone with a vampire." So many things wrong with that.
• The 1989 film Dead Calm seems like it's based on an original concept, right? It's actually based on an unfinished Orson Welles film called The Deep which in turn is based on a book, Dead Calm by Charles Williams.
• Ever wondered why the building-collapsing scene in the 4th-layer dream of Inception (2010) is so similar to the self-restoration of the city scene of Dark City (1998)? Why? Because they are both homages to the ending of the AKIRA manga (1982-1990).
• Some friends head to Las Vegas for a fun time, and after a night of drunken partying, wake up in their disheveled hotel room to discover they've apparently gotten married to some Vegas cocktail waitresses. As they attempt to make sense of what happened and get out of their new marriages, they face such obstacles as show tigers and a celebrity boxer. The 2009 film The Hangover? I was talking about the 1999 The Simpsons episode "Viva Ned Flanders"! And before then, you had the 1998 film Very Bad Things, which similar to The Hangover featured a bachelor party in Las Vegas gone wrong and the hilarity ensuing from covering up the evidence (Though Very Bad Things is much, much darker).
  • In the same vein, this society has a day where nothing is illegal once a year, with no consequences. The Purge? No, it's the Futurama episode "A Taste of Freedom"!
• The Purge centers around the concept of a 12-hour period of time during which crime is legal and citizens are allowed to do almost anything they want, including pillage, rape, and murder, during this time. The concept, however, dates back to an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Return of the Archons", when the crew of the Enterprise arrive on a planet of otherwise docile people who, during a "Festival" that commences on the "Red Hour", act on their baser impulses and commit otherwise inconciable acts of violence and debauchery. This episode even serves as a partial inspiration for The Purge, according to director James DeMonaco.
• New Media Are Evil types would have you think that sex and violence are new to movies. In reality, intense sex and violence have been in movies since the birth of cinema in the late 19th century. In fact, complaints about there being too much sex/violence/etc. in movies were actually what led to The Hays Code in the mid-1930s.
• Probably the most common one is people believing that "Revenge is a dish best served cold" comes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, misunderstanding a reference to the phrase as claiming it a Klingon proverb. (Actually, a character is only asking what the equivalent Klingon proverb is.) In fact, it's French. (This did not stop the Kill Bill movies from identifying it as Klingon, which was most likely an intentional "mistake" on Quentin Tarantino's part.)
  • Probably the first recorded usage occurs in the 1782 novel Dangerous Liaisons by French author Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
  • Mario Puzo's 1969 novel "The Godfather" uses "Revenge is a dish best served cold" and identifies it as Italian. This predates the use in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" at the very least.
    • Even earlier in film history, in the 1949 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, the narrator and protagonist Louis Mazzini says this: "As in an old Italian proverb: revenge is the dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold."
  • The Klingons seem to be guilty of a lot of this. "Today is a good day to die," comes from the Lakota Nation and their leader Crazy Horse, but is associated with Klingons. Proud Warrior Race much?
    • In-joke, Klingons claim Shakespeare was one of them, they also claim some of our sayings.
    • Which is another "older than they think" joke. It was done earlier in the movie Pimpernel Smith (1941), where a German general insists that Shakespeare was German. Smith's comeback? "Yes, how very upsetting. Still, you must admit that the English translations are most remarkable."
    • It's also an in-joke for the franchise, as it's directly analogous to Chekov's TOS habit of wrongly attributing all sorts of historical inventions and ideas to Russians.
  • "From hell's heart I stab at thee..." is originally by Herman Melville (from Moby-Dick), but more likely to be quoted now secondhand as a reference to Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan.
    • Khan uses several Moby-Dick lines in the film. However, this is intended as him consciously quoting the book. He sees himself as analogous to Ahab, a great man injured by a monster (Kirk) who has dedicated his life to the death of said monster. A copy of the book is seen earlier in the film when Chekov and Terrill are searching the shelter on Ceti Alpha 5. Literary allusions are nothing new to the character; in his original appearance he quotes Milton.
    • Cetus is the constellation of the whale.
    • Wrath of Khan is essentially a feature-length Moby Schtick.
  • Referenced, or possibly lampshaded, in the later Star Trek movies.
    Spock: There is an old Vulcan proverb: "Only Nixon could go to China."
    (and)
    Spock: An ancestor of mine once maintained, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains — however improbable — must be the truth." Of course, it's possible that this idea independently originated from someone on Vulcan as well.
    • That last one is partly a joke about how Spock is half-human, so technically one of his ancestors (by implication, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) did say (or write) that.
    • It may also have been a nod to the fandom, among which it had been widely speculated since 1967 that Spock was related to Sherlock Holmes. Several scholarly essays associated him with the Wold-Newton Family of Philip José Farmer, which also included Sherlock.
• One complaint about Star Trek (2009) was that the romantic relationship between Spock and Uhura was random and came out of nowhere. They forget that in early episodes, Uhura flirted with Spock a couple of times, and the kiss she shared later with Kirk was originally supposed to be between her and Spock. There's also rumours that, had the executives allowed it, a relationship would have developed between them. Fans (at least those not busy creating Kirk/Spock Slash Fic) often focused on Uhura as a possible romantic interest for Spock.
  • Also, the very premise for the reboot, Kirk and Spock first meeting in Starfleet Academy? Per a Starlog magazine from 1988, the idea was being kicked around by both Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek II director Nicholas Meyer as an alternate universe television series. Star Trek II producer Harve Bennett wanted to use it for Star Trek VI, but it was rejected in favor of a story featuring the entire TOS cast (his story would've featured only William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as Kirk and Spock in the present-day).
• One related to Trek, but not directly part of it; much of the premise and plot of Galaxy Quest can be traced to a 1967 Star Trek: The Original Series fanfic called "Visit to a Weird Planet" where a transporter malfunction swaps Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelly with their fictional counterparts in the middle of a crisis, forcing the actors into the bluff of their lives. Swapping actor and character was a small genre of fanfiction more common to the 70's and 80's than today, playing more on the then-unknown status of organized fandom.
• Marvel Comics' Daredevil utilized many aspects of the "gritty and realistic" approach to superhero movies about two years before Christopher Nolan got credit for trying the same approach with Batman Begins (though it was much less successful). Aside from the two costumed vigilantes, the movie could easily be mistaken for a gritty crime drama, and it even deconstructed many aspects of superhero stories: Daredevil is shown to be nearly dependent on painkillers because of his injuries from fighting criminals, his Honor Before Reason tendencies have left his legal practice struggling because he refuses to represent wealthy men who he knows to be guilty, and though he triumphs over his archenemy, he ultimately fails to save his love interest, Elektra.
• A young boy, heartbroken by the death of his beloved dog, resorts to crackpot science to re-animate his beloved pet. If you think it's the animated film Frankenweenie, or even the original live-action short, that first used this, you're several decades off: Dr. Robert Cornish wrote and starred in Life Returns, based on his Real Life experiments in adrenaline-triggered resuscitation, in 1935.
• The 2002 film Jason X took Jason to space. However, the Recycled In Space idea was done as a parody first in a 1995 episode of MADtv (which combined Friday the 13th with the plot of Apollo 13).
• After the success of The Hunger Games in 2012, the Japanese film Battle Royale was given a belated North American DVD/Blu-ray release. Some uninformed fans claimed Battle Royale was a rip-off of Hunger Games, even though the film and the novel it was based on predates Hunger Games by a number of years.
• 2012's Best Picture Oscar winner The Artist was a beautiful love letter to old Hollywood, but its plot was virtually identical to that of Singin' in the Rain. The idea of inserting unexpected sound elements into an otherwise-silent film was also not completely original as Charlie Chaplin had done something similar in Modern Times and in fact The Jazz Singer did it too.
• The Straight Story is often labelled as David Lynch's one non-maddening movie. While it is playing against type (being a simple G-rated Disney movie as opposed to the more surreal and unnerving Mind Screw films he is famous for making), it is not the first time he made a film that was meant to have a comprehensible story, having directed The Elephant Man back in 1980, Dune in 1984, and Blue Velvet in 1986. However it is still incredibly mellow even compared to the aforementioned movies.
• A lot of reviewers and people who watched A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) praised the introduction of micro-naps to the series as a clever invention. They were actually introduced in Freddy vs. Jason, in which Lori's father briefly morphs into Freddy in broad daylight when she's sleep-deprived.
• There is a scene in The Fly (1986) where Jeff Goldblum describes himself as an insect who dreamed he was a man. This was intended as a Chuang Tzu reference, but many people just thought he was referring to the "unsettling dreams" in Kafka's "Metamorphosis".
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Man of Steel:
    • Superman kills Zod, which some might think is a dark, new direction for the character, but it's actually been done before in Superman Vol. 2 #22 (the end of The Supergirl Saga) and to all appearances in Superman II.
    • A lot of stuff that several reviewers have credited (or accused) Man of Steel of adding to the Superman mythos are actually from the comics, such as Superman's "S" symbol being the Kryptonian symbol meaning "hope",^note Marlon Brando is credited with the original idea of the "S" symbol actually being the El family crest. Kryptonians being Designer Babies, one of the Kryptonians being a Mad Scientist (the character is named in the credits as Jax-Ur, a character dating back to 1961), Superman being treated with fear and distrust from some people, and even Kryptonian dragons.
  • Birds of Prey (2020):
    • People have criticized the casting of Jurnee Smollett as Black Canary due to the character being white and well as "being" blonde. Except one: First Wave (DC Comics) did do a Race Lift on Black Canary prior to this and two: canonically, Black Canary isn't a natural blonde; she's a noirette who, depending on the era, uses a wig or bleach to achieve the blonde look.
    • The lack of a mask on Black Mask and his fashion sense (wearing a white jacket and pants with Hawaiian shirts) was likewise criticized — with likewise a prior basis. The depiction of Batman: Under the Red Hood dressed in similar clothes. Additionally, the Skull for a Head look Sionis has been depicted with since Batman: No Man's Land in the comics actually isn't a mask (despite The Batman and the Batman: Arkham Series presenting it as such), but Sionis's actual face, the result of him cutting off the mask fused to his face in Batman: No Man's Land.
• Many fans think Pacific Rim is based off of Neon Genesis Evangelion, while Del Toro has explicitly stated that he had never seen the series and was basing the film off older super robot shows he had seen in his youth. His co-writer Travis Beacham might have been familiar with EVA and included some references, but the point that it's a more general genre homage still stands. What some fans also forget is that "Humans piloting robots to fight giant monsters" was already a thriving anime genre as far back as The '70s, with Getter Robo and Mazinger Z being two of the most prominent examples. EVA and Pacific Rim are both intentional homages to those kinds of older shows.
• With the release of the 2014 Godzilla reboot, some people (mostly from countries where the Japanese films haven't been released) are expressing their surprise (and in some cases bitter disappointment) upon finding out that Godzilla was not, in fact, created by Roland Emmerich. Even if they are aware of the franchise's Japanese roots, a few still see the fact that the monster does battle with other giant creatures as a unique direction, at times comparing it to more recent "monster VS monster" flicks (like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus), even though he's been doing that in nearly every movie since 1955's Godzilla Raids Again. Likewise, his ability to shoot radioactive breath comes as a surprise to many who grew up on the 1998 film.
  • Gigan's eye beam debuted in Godzilla Island, a whole 6 or so years before Final Wars did it. And the general concept of Godzilla, a prehistoric monster attacking a city, dates all the way back to 1925, with the first film version of The Lost World.
  • The original 1954 film wasn't even the first time a giant lizard-like monster emerged from the ocean to attack Tokyo. In 1947, some staff of the WVTR radio station in Tokyo reportedly played a prank where they claimed to be receiving reports of a 20-foot tall lizard monster that had emerged from Tokyo Bay and was besieging the city, the military's efforts to stop it proving futile. About an hour into the broadcast, one of their on scene reporters approaches the monster...which promptly congratulated them on the fifth anniversary of their station, revealing it to be a big joke. Newspapers at the time reported that the radio play caused mass hysteria in the city, and while this is almost certainly exaggerated like the 1938 War of the Worlds radio play before it, it did lead to the men involved being fired for the stunt.
  • There are people who draw parallels with Godzilla: The Series due to the titular monster's somewhat heroic portrayal in the 2014 film, unaware that a lot of the original movies (and a previous animated adaption) have already covered that ground.
  • The script for Godzilla vs. Biollante was pitched as part of a create-a-script contest by Toho, but what many people don't know is that the contest winner first wrote his script when he was 16 and originally pitched it as part of a similar contest for 1971's Return of Ultraman. That early version of the script ended up becoming the 34th episode of the show, in which Ultraman Jack battles a giant planimal created by a scientist.
• There are comedy Mockumentary films older than This is Spın̈al Tap. For example from 1972 is The BBC TV movie The Black Safari where a crew of native African adventurers are followed by a camera crew as they explore the darkest corners of Northern England.
• Inception isn't the first film to use the distinctive horn sound, but it's the one that stands out to the mainstream, to the point that many other instances are accused of ripping it off.
• A big reason why Dune (1984) took so long to come out and was changed so vastly from the book was because the various producers and writers involved were worried about being called a Star Wars ripoff. Frank Herbert still considered the end product pretty faithful to the book.
• "Klaatu Barada Nikto" is obviously a reference to 1992's Army of Darkness, even when used in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
• X-Men: Days of Future Past introduced mainstream audiences to the character of Blink, whose power is essentially to create portals. Of course, this resulted in many people saying the character must've clearly been inspired by the video game Portal, even though the character Blink predates that game by over a decade.
• Many people think The Sixth Sense was the first movie to employ the Dead All Along twist ending; in fact, as that trope page indicates, this plot device goes back a long way. Word of God has stated that he got the idea from a 1994 episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?.
  • Which in turn got the idea from the 1976 James Herbert story, "The Survivor".
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014):
  • Shredder's armor has received some nasty scrutiny from certain portions of the fanbase, with such comments that they turned him into "a Transformer", no doubt inspired by Michael Bay's involvement as producer — even though it's plainly obvious the character is simply wearing full-body Powered Armor, the design of which recalls the Shredder of the 2003 animated series. Some shots of the rooftop battle even show that his arms are exposed, just like nearly every older version.
  • There were also complaints over Shredder not being Japanese. Considering that the Shredder has been an alien, a demonic abomination and a woman, this is hardly the most drastic change to his character. And it turns out, he is Japanese.
  • Having the Turtles and Splinter be lab animals who April already knew back then is similar to the IDW Comics continuity, though with its own twists.
  • Foot Soldiers relying heavily on firearms as opposed to martial arts training and stealth like what is typically expected of ninja also recalls the incarnations depicted in the original animated series, who on the basis of being robots were used repeatedly as Cannon Fodder.
  • Some people complained about the use of Toilet Humour being added for the 2014 movie, even though it's been common in the franchise since the 2000s, with that type of humor being used in the 2007 film, the 2012 cartoon, and even the Darker and Edgier 2003 cartoon.
• Annie (2014):
  • A lot of people complain about Sandy the dog being changed to a Shiba Inu. Sandy in the original Little Orphan Annie comics is almost always a large, orange or reddish-brown dog with pointed ears and a white muzzle. The new dog is more true to the source than the Otterhound Sandy from the 80s film.
  • This isn't the first modern version of Annie — the comic had spent much of its last two decades abandoning its Unintentional Period Piece trappings before it ended.
• Despite comparisons to Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Dracula Untold might have more in common with the Dracula: Vlad the Impaler comic book series published by Topps in 1993 (see here), detailing the life of the historical Vlad before he became a vampire.
• The Book of Life has more than a few similarities with Once on This Island; albeit with a Mexican gender-flip.
• In A Perfect Murder, David Suchet plays Mohamed "Mo" Karaman, a Muslim immigrant who fled the war to refuge in the United States and becomes an NYPD homicide detective. This is not the first time that he has played a foreign detective, as his backstory bears some striking resemblance to that of Hercule Poirot, a role that Suchet first played in the 1989 British TV series Agatha Christie's Poirot.
• Most people associate the Mirror Routine with the Marx Brothers, who did it in Duck Soup (1933). But even they were just using a standard vaudeville routine that Max Linder did on screen first in "Seven Years Bad Luck" (1921).
• Homer Simpson's "D'oh!" actually originated from actor James Finlayson in the Laurel and Hardy who used it in the same context, but said it much slower and longer.
• Many fans of the 1994 movie The Little Rascals are unaware of the film series that it was based on.
• Cinderella (2015):
  • "Lavender's Blue" is an actual folk-song, and made an appearance in an earlier Disney film So Dear To My Heart (1948).
  • Several previous adaptations have had Cinderella meet the Prince before the ball, such as the 1965 and 1997 Rodgers and Hammerstein telefilms, the modern-day adaptation A Cinderella Story, and the Muppet version, Hey Cinderella!. And of course, the scene with the stag was actually based on a cut scene from the original animated film. One should not forget Ever After either, where almost the entire relationship between Danielle (this version's Cinderella) and the Prince occurs before the ball.
  • This is also not the first Cinderella film to have black characters; the 1997 version went above and beyond just one.
  • Cinderella singing alerting the Captain and the Prince that there is another girl in the house locked in the attic could be a reference to Jetlag's animated version of the story, the Nollywood film version, or possibly Walter de La Mare's version (the line "Has your cat learned to sing?" is similar to his "Has the pump learned English?").
  • Cinderella's actual name being Ella and the "Cinder" being an insulting prefix appears in many adaptations, as well as the original tale.
• Some may think that the anime Attack on Titan and its film adaptation invented the notion of giant monsters who resemble disfigured or mutated humans, but the idea shows up in some far older films. Namely, The Amazing Colossal Man and its sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, The Cyclops, Frankenstein Conquers the World and its sequel, War of the Gargantuas. Bonus points to Frankenstein Conquers the World for giving its monster regenerative abilities similar to the Titans, and to Gargantuas for having one of the titular beasts feed primarily on human flesh.
• Picture a scene where the hero is kicking back and relaxing when an unsavory character shows up, points a gun at him, then starts giving a big speech about killing him, only to be interrupted by the hero casually blowing a hole in his chest with an out-of-sight handgun. You're likely thinking of the Han vs. Greedo scene in Star Wars, but that exact setup showed in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly about a decade earlier. The only key differences are that Tuco is taking a bath and has his gun hidden in the bubbles, whereas as Han is holding his under a table, and that there's no special edition where Tuco lets the bad guy shoot first.
  • Slightly more obscure, but even older, John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn features a similar scene where James Stewart (as Wyatt Earp) shoots an outlaw's foot with a concealed derringer while playing poker. There's even a shot of Stewart fumbling for his gun under the table like Han reaching for his blaster. Lucas is a major John Ford fan so its likely he kept this in mind, since Han Solo was intended to be a Space Cowboy.
  • The idea of a villain being so cool that he ends up stealing the film from the male and female leads, spawns a spinoff franchise that deals with his origins, and who also causes an ethical dilemma for the hero out of a personal bond often strikes many as being Darth Vader's thing in Star Wars, but before Vader, the most iconic example of that kind of villain from cinema was Harry Lime from The Third Man played by Orson Welles. A villain who is so cool, that the audience ends up rooting for him and sympathizing with his eloquent justifications, who is also a Fallen Hero who comes to blows with his best friend. That's true for both Lime and later Vader, complete with a spin-off radio show and a number of novels, which are prequels dealing with his adventures before The Third Man showing how he went from the relatively decent man Holly Martins remembered to the scoundrel we see in the movie. Lime also tries to get Holly to join him by preaching his own amoral philosophy much like Vader does to Luke. The fact that Welles was one of Lucas' first choices for Vader's voice is likely not an accident, since Lucas admired Welles as both actor and director, and The Third Man was a huge commercial hit in the late '40s and '50s and easily the most commercially successful movie Welles ever appeared in, and the radio spin-off (where Welles voices Lime again) was similarly successful.
• Despite the generally positive reception to Thor, some fans criticized the movie for Doing In the Wizard by implying that Asgardians were actually Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that early Europeans mistook for gods. Warren Ellis actually introduced the very same idea in the comics over 15 years prior, and it later wound up being reused in the Elseworld story Earth X.
• Sergio Leone synthesized the plots and attitudes of many American Westerns rather than creating something completely new. Although Leone happily acknowledged his inspirations, viewers and critics often credited him with innovations he never claimed for himself.
  • To start, Leone did not invent the Spaghetti Western. His own father Vincenzo (alias Roberto Roberti) directed one in the silent era, The Indian Vampire, which also starred Leone's mother Bice Valerian. The genre was already gaining steam before Leone due to the collapse of the Sword and Sandal genre in Italy, a succession of German "Sauerkraut Westerns" based on the Winnetou novels and the popularity of American Westerns in postwar Italy.^note How popular? Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo was the highest-grossing movie ever released in Italy prior to Leone's For a Few Dollars More. Leone did, however, provide the Spaghetti Western with a unique style and Grey-and-Gray Morality as opposed to merely aping the mood and tone of American Westerns. Leone disliked critics claiming that he "invented" the genre, once asking an interviewer "how many sons of bitches do you think I've spawned?"
  • Film critics often point out that Leone's films which are often seen as emblematic of the "revisionist Western" was merely repackaging several films made in The '50s (the true Golden Age of The Western). Compare for instance, Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz, with treasure-hunting American gunfighters double-crossing each other in French-occupied Mexico, to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which has a similar plot set in the American Civil War. For a Few Dollars More borrows its concept of a revenge killer showing victims his pocket watch from The Bravados with Gregory Peck. Leone's signature duster jackets showed up in several John Ford movies, especially My Darling Clementine. Leone's iconic close-up of actors in widescreen frames (known as "Beeg Eyes") was there in Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns shot in glorious black-and-white Cinemascope.
  • Once Upon a Time in the West was arguably nothing but a huge collection of homages to classic Westerns, from High Noon to Seven Men From Now. Leone admitted as much and he told his screenwriters to think accordingly. The famous gimmick of casting Henry Fonda against type as a bad guy was prefigured by John Ford who made him a Custer Expy in Fort Apache (and likewise calls dibs on demolishing Custer's legend before Little Big Man). Leone was also not the first Ford fanboy to reconfigure Westerns. Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai picture Yojimbo was redressed in cowboy hats to become A Fistful of Dollars and Leone got sued accordingly by Kurosawa.
  • Likewise, some have credited Leone's films for introducing greater violence in Westerns, but already in The '50s you had Anthony Mann whose films had characters hurling scissors into the face of enemies, had Jimmy Stewart's hands shot badly by the bad guy, and much brutal violence and shootings, so much so that film critic Manny Farber nicknamed him "Tin Can De Sade".
  • In many cases Westerns made in The '50s were more sophisticated than Leone, whose films never dealt with politics (such as Native American displacement and other issues of gun violence and race/gender politics).^note The exception was A Fistful of Dynamite, which is largely a commentary on European radical politics disguised as a Western. Johnny Guitar is today identified as the first avant-garde Western in that it had female cowboys, bright candy coloured outfits, subverted the black-hat and white-hat dynamic, had a real anti-authoritarian bent.
  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller by Robert Altman turned many heads in The '70s for being a Western set in snowbound landscapes, with many noting that Westerns are usually set in hot arid landscapes. But snowbound westerns do exist in the classic era: Anthony Mann's The Far Country, Andre DeToth's Day of the Outlaw and even John Ford's The Searchers has a scene in a snowy region during the time passes montage (it's also where John Wayne mouths the iconic "turning of the earth" speech). Likewise a few years before Altman, there's the famous spaghetti western The Great Silence by Sergio Corbucci which was also a downer of a film set in a bleak snowclad landscape.
• Big Trouble in Little China actually predates many of the titles audiences might think it's referencing, as Robin Laws points out in Blowing Up the Movies:
  Tsui Hark's Wuxia game-changer Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1982) exists as a reference at this point, along with such early kung fu ghost comedies as Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980, Sammo Hung) and The Dead and the Deadly (1982, Wu Ma). But as the film is being written (...) most of the HK supernatural fu classics have yet to be made. No Mr. Vampire (q.v.), no A Chinese Ghost Story (q.v.), no Swordsman (1990, credited to King Hu). The western fandom for HK films extant in 1986 revolves around Bruce Lee, Shaw Brothers chop socky, and real-world martial arts practice. It sure isn't ready for lightning-throwing warriors or ghostly sorcerors. Accordingly, Big Trouble flops on its theatrical release, joining the roster of fan favourites that slowly grows its popularity on home video.
• It's largely assumed that color films began in The '60s or that The Wizard of Oz was the first technicolor film. The first full-length film in color was the silent film The Toll of the Sea from 1922.
• The death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens was actually suggested by Harrison Ford when filming ended on The Empire Strikes Back.
• Selective color (that trick where certain objects are in color while the rest of the film is in black and white) is generally thought of as a modern effect that is achieved digitally for movies like Schindler's List and Sin City, but the effect was actually achieved as early as the 1910s using the complex Handschiegl dye process. The most famous example of this is the Phantom's billowing red cloak in The Phantom of the Opera (1925); others, better known to film historians than the general public, are Erich von Stroheim's 1924 Greed, in which gold, money and other objects of the titular obsession were tinted, well, gold, and Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin with its red flag. William Castle created his own low-tech method in 1959 for The Tingler, which consisted of painting the sets and actors in various shades of grey, then splashing bright red blood everywhere.
• Many of the "new ideas" Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) is credited with when compared to the original film actually date back to the 1976 remake. Carl Denham is sleazy and borders on being villainous, more like Fred Wilson from the 1976 than the Denham of the original. Ann develops a soft spot for Kong and is able to communicate with and control him like Dwan could in the 1976 film, while the original Ann hates Kong and never manages to calm him down. The 2005 and 1976 Jacks are both somewhat effeminate intellectuals who aren't supposed to be on the ship while the 1933 Jack was a rugged, masculine sailor. Kong himself is sort of a gentle giant who can be pushed too far in both remakes, while in the original he's almost always on the rampage.
• Deadpool (2016):
  • Several interviews with the cast and crew had them referencing Deadpool being pansexual with Ryan Reynolds even saying he hoped Deadpool could have a boyfriend in the sequel. A lot of fans erupted in anger over this, claiming that they changed his sexuality for the movie, but in truth Deadpool was confirmed as being attracted to men in the comics years ago. Thor, Cable, Wiccan and Hulkling are just a few of the men he's openly had a crush on.
  • Wade's joke that, with three Taken movies released, at some point you have to wonder if it's just bad parenting. Three years before Deadpool (2016), Liam Neeson said almost the same thing.
  • A surprisingly large number of fans thought this was the first superhero movie that was rated R. The concept of an R-rated superhero movie has been around at least since the '90s with movies such as The Crow (1994) and Spawn. Even a few years ago, comic fans got an R-rated Watchmen movie as well as Kick-Ass. Then, you have non-comicbook based superhero movies such as Super or Defendor which are R-rated. No-one can even say this is the first Marvel movie to get an R-Rating (hello, Blade).
• The New Mutants isn't the first Marvel horror movie; that honor goes to Blade (1998). However, this is the closest we will ever get to a traditional Haunted House horror movie made by Marvel Comics.
• Complaints about Max being "sidelined" in Mad Max: Fury Road tend to neglect that both Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome also featured Max as a Supporting Protagonist who has to choose a side in someone else's conflict.
  • When Fury Road was released in Japan, younger viewers thought it was copying Fist of the North Star. Actually, it's the other way around.
• The notion of the Torture Porn film — that is, a movie that exists primarily to show people being painfully tortured and killed in graphic detail — is often credited to modern movies like Saw and Hostel, but it dates back to 1963's Blood Feast, which popularized such movies amongst drive-in audiences in the days before the MPAA came about.
• The movie What Women Want is about a guy with socializing problems gaining the ability to read minds, using it to improve his social standing, then losing the ability, but gaining true love in return. So is E. T. A. Hoffmann's novel Master Flea, 1822.
• Some people criticized the casting of Tom Holland as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, saying that Marvel was trying too hard to make the character Younger and Hipper. Spider-Man was a teenager when he first started off in the comics and for the entirety of Ultimate Spider-Man, as well as the original Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie (though he graduated high school midway through the film) and the first Amazing Spider-Man. It's just that thanks to the Dawson Casting, people tend to remember the previous cinematic Spider-Men as being much older.
• The very first Universal Horror film? It's not The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) or The Phantom of the Opera (1925); it's the silent movie The Werewolf, released in 1913. (It's also the first werewolf movie with a female werewolf. Unfortunately, it no longer exists due to a fire at Universal Studios in 1924.)
• Young hotshot Oscar-winning Italian-American director gets a major studio to greenlight his ambitious dream project. The perfectionist filmmaker runs way behind schedule and puts the film over budget. The studio, concerned that the project might threaten its very existence, starts to meddle in the film. The director delivers an initial cut in excess of 5 hours. The studio urges him to trim the film and he finally gets it down to 3.5 hours. A preview screening of that cut bombs horribly, and the studio takes the film away from the director and re-edits it on its own. Heaven's Gate? Or minus a few of the specifics, Apocalypse Now? No, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon in 1937.
  • Frank Capra wasn't even the first Italian-American film-maker, that honour goes to Frank Borzage who was one of the biggest film-makers of The Roaring '20s and the early-30s (on account of his frankness in dealing with sexuality, he didn't make many notable films beyond the Pre-Code Era with a few exceptions, chiefly his Film Noir Moonrise).
  • The first Italian-American star was Richard Conte who appeared in many crime films, Film Noir and other films of The '40s and The '50s. One of those films was a movie by Joseph L. Mankiewicz called House of Strangers where he's the younger son of a corrupt Italian-American patriarch who wants him to be good, gets called out for assimilating into WASP America by his fellow brothers, and the entire story is a metaphor for Italian-American immigration. Conte's casting as Barzini in The Godfather was very much a Homage.
• Some people (with varying degrees of seriousness) treated Black Panther as "the first black superhero movie." This ignores Spawn and the Blade trilogy, as well as less auspicious ones like Steel and Catwoman (2004). As a nod to this, the How It Should Have Ended episode for Black Panther ended with Blade emerging to challenge T'Challa for the throne.
  Blade: Time for the Daywalker to take back his day!
• During The New '10s, popular review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes has come under fire for its use of "Fresh" and "Rotten" labels to describe a film's quality, which some filmmakers and studio executives have derided as being reductionist and unfair. Despite this, the use of shorthand for grading movies is by no means a new development. As The New York Times pointed out, similar accusations were made against Siskel & Ebert back in the 1980's over their use of "Thumbs up" and "Thumbs down" ratings, while backlash over the use of a star system to grade movies dates at least back to the late 1920's.
• 2015's Carol is mistaken for a modern '50s Period Piece. In actuality, the original novel was contemporary. The Price Of Salt was written in 1952. It predates the rise of queer romance novels by several decades.
• A movie starring a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who team up to stop someone named Loki from destroying the world. That's The Avengers (2012), right? Nope — Dogma did it all the way back in 1999.
• Rambo: Last Blood: Contrary to what many critics believe, the idea of Rambo fighting against sex traffickers near the U.S.-Mexico border and saving a girl from them wasn't inspired by the politics of the late '10s. It actually dates back to 2009, shortly after filming for Rambo IV wrapped up.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, from 1982, is usually considered the Trope Codifier for Product Placement as it exists in movies today, with obvious plugs for products done as a mutually-beneficial tie-in between the movie and the product. The sales of Reese's Pieces shot through the roof after being featured in the film. ^note  Ironically, the filmmakers never intended to specially highlight Reese's Pieces; they were originally going to use M&Ms (which were, according to the novel, meant to be what inspired E.T. to discover the Speak-And-Spell, seeing the "M" from the candy on the keyboard), but replaced them with Reese's Pieces because Mars Inc. didn't want their flagship candy to be associated with aliens But the practice goes all the way back to the beginning of Hollywood. Wings, the first Best Picture winner, had a conspicuous close-up of the wrapper of a Hershey chocolate bar a character was eating. It's a Wonderful Life features cameos by National Geographic and a Coca-Cola sign. The Trope Maker for companies paying to be featured in a movie is 1949's Love Happy. The cash-strapped production solicited products like Wheaties and Baby Ruth to be featured on billboards in the background of a rooftop chase scene.
• While the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most popular Shared Universe, it wasn't the first. That title goes to Universal Studios's Universal Horror in the 1940s with crossovers like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein, the latter of which starred Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Wolf Man. Likewise, Toho Studios have been making interconnected Kaiju movies since the 1960s when they started bringing in Rodan and Mothra into the Showa-era Godzilla movies.
• Wonder Woman (2017):
  • German soldiers wear the Stahlhelm instead of the pointy Pickelhaube more often associated with World War I, thus leading some lazy observers to think this was set in World War II from the trailers and that she was beating up Those Wacky Nazis. The Pickelhaube was phased out in 1916 in favor of the Stahlhelm^note (as the name indicates, the Stahlhelm was made of steel, while most Pickelhaube were actually made of leather and provided zero protection to the soldiers' head in case of shellings, introduction of the Stahlelm decreased head injuries by 70%) and the movie takes place in 1918. Not only that, these soldiers wear the era-accurate M-1916 model◊, whereas World War II German soldiers wore M-1935 and M-1940 models◊, which were logical upgrades a few decades after the helmet's invention.
  • Similarly, the portrayal of Erich Ludendorff as the film's Big Bad (well, at least until Ares is revealed) was occasionally criticized as an exaggerated caricature more appropriate to the Nazis than a Great War officer. Well, the real Ludendorff didn't actually murder a group of other generals for considering peace talks, and wasn't killed by Wonder Woman shortly before the war's end, but beyond that it's not much of an exaggeration. He was very much a proto-Nazi possessing the racial and mystical obsessions attributed to him in the film,^note Though Ludendorff was, unsurprisingly, more attracted to Norse and Germanic gods than the Greek gods of the movie once called war "the foundation of human civilization" and started the "stab-in-the-back" myth later used by the Nazis to justify their antisemitism. Indeed Ludendorff was an ally to the Nazis in their early years (famously joining them in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923), falling out with them largely because he resented Adolf Hitler's growing popularity.
  • Ares as a Quintessential British Gentleman had been done in the DC Animated Universe episode "Hawk and Dove" where he's voiced by Michael York. Like in the film, he enjoys Running Both Sides to drive conflict and increase his power.
  • This isn't the first World War I film set in the trenches to feature David Thewlis as a bad guy. Steven Spielberg's War Horse got there first.
• When the Sam Raimi Spider-Man Trilogy first came out and depicted Spider-Man with organic webbing, many fans were displeased. The idea of a Spider-Man with organic webbing is actually much older these films, having been used in the Spider-Man 2099 mini-series.
• Up until the year 2000 every generation seems to have thought they invented the Revisionist Western. The truth is that the concept is as almost as old as the genre itself. The Other Wiki states that they date back to the 1940s, with a handful of classics coming out every decade (especially in the 60s and 70s), but it may be even older than that.
  • Many classic Westerns border on deconstructions of the tropes they were supposed to have established. John Ford, for instance, was well aware of the moral contradictions of the "taming" of the West, generally depicting the genre's usual heroes (lawmen, gunfighters and outlaws) as antiheroes at best if not outright villains, and the "civilization" they represented as often corrupt, hypocritical and racist. Ford was also highly (if imperfectly) sympathetic towards Native Americans and rarely depicted them as outright villains, aside from Stagecoach and a handful of others. Ford overall treats "the winning of the West" as a mixed blessing, despite the general optimism of his films.
  • Even in the silent era, Westerns like Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man offered sympathetic, if often patronizing depictions of Native Americans. The subgenre became especially popular in the '40s and '50s, with movies like Fort Apache, Broken Arrow (1950) and Run Of The Arrow being extremely sympathetic towards indigenous peoples, and equally critical of American aggression towards them. Anthony Mann's Devils Doorway, released in 1950, even features a Native American protagonist (albeit one played by white actor Robert Taylor) who initiates a war against greedy, racist white ranchers trying to steal his land — and is portrayed as unabashedly in the right. That said, such depictions often suffered from having white protagonists, with the natives themselves demoted to a secondary role. By the 1970s, after the popularity of films like Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse, it became difficult to find Westerns that weren't at least nominally pro-Native in their outlook.
  • Similarly, Westerns loved parodying, deconstructing and otherwise commenting upon the gunfighter ethos common to the genre pretty much from the beginning, long before Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah got hold of the genre. By the early '50s, films like The Gunfighter and Winchester '73 regularly depicted gunslingers either as neurotic antiheroes or men tormented by their own notoriety. Even as archetypical a Western as Shane stresses the loneliness of the gunfighter and his lack of a place in a civilized society. And while Wyatt Earp's modern, mixed reputation is largely shaped by the Grey-and-Gray Morality of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, earlier films like Cheyenne Autumn, Hour of the Gun and especially Doc (where Earp is an outright villain) beat them to the punch by decades.
  • What's especially strange is by the times the 1990s rolled around the only westerns being made were revisionist, to such a degree that Roger Ebert criticized Back to the Future Part III for being too much of a classic western (which it arguably wasn't).
• Doctor Strange (2016) turns Wong into a capable sorcerer in his own right and Strange's teacher in the mystic arts as opposed to his manservant. But almost a full decade prior to the movie, the kid friendly Marvel Adventures line of comics took a similar approach, turning Wong into Stephen's friend from med school, a fellow student of the mystic arts, and the person who first introduced him to the Ancient One.
• Nope: Many reviewers suggested that the idea that flying saucers could be a living organism in itself that sucks up and devours people and animals (and that this causes rainfalls of blood, as in some anecdotal reports) was an original and creative idea. This very concept was actually once a popular idea amongst UFO theorists in the 1950s, having first been suggested as far back as the 1920's in the writings of Charles Fort. It eventually faded into obscurity when the concept of The Greys and Alien Abduction took hold in the 1960's.
• What was the first cinematic adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice? Tay Garnett's 1946 film noir starring Lana Turner as Cora and John Garfield as Frank? No. Ossessione, the 1943 debut of Italian director Luchino Visconti? Again, no. The correct answer is Pierre Chenal's 1939 film Le dernier tournant (The Last Turning), starring Fernand Gravey as Frank, Michel Simon as Nick, and Corinne Luchaire as Cora.
• Oscar (1991): A Slight Case of Murder covered many of this movie's plot points (a Reformed Criminal spending a chaotic day dealing with his daughter's marriage, his loyal but dimwitted old goons' inability to adapt to becoming servants instead of thugs, an old enemy gangster who poses a threat to his life, and an important meeting with some bankers) before Oscar star Sylvester Stallone was even born.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indy isn't actually the first fictional Nazi fighter to use a whip and revolver and be nicknamed after a state (or in his case, a dog named after a state). The DCU C-List Fodder superhero Harold "Tex" Thompson/Mr. America/Americommando also has all of those traits.
• On July 21st 2023, Barbenheimer came out, and it took off because movie-goers were amused by the idea of a lighthearted, women-centric comedy romp being released on the same day as a dark and heavy Christopher Nolan film. However, ignoring the fact that this setup is a simple case of counter-programming, the exact same thing had already happened twice before:
  • On July 21st 2008, Nolan's The Dark Knight - sequel to the Darker and Edgier Batman reboot Batman Begins - was released on the same day as Mamma Mia!, an adaptation of the the jukebox musical of the same name. Interestingly, the distributors were swapped (Warner Bros. released The Dark Knight and Barbie, while Universal released Mamma Mia and Oppenheimer). Both movies were massive hits in their own rights, but in both pairings, the WB film came out on top.
  • On 21st July 2017, Nolan's World War II movie Dunkirk was released on the same day as road trip comedy Girls Trip (once again released by WB and Universal respectively). While the latter was a hit in its own right and well received, it didn't take off like Barbie or Mamma Mia, and Dunkirk itself was Nolan's lowest grossing post-Batman film up to that point.
• Despite the "tried it once and didn't like it" scene being considered one of Carry On Abroad's most memorable by fans, June Whitfield wasn't the first actress to utter this phrase to Sid James. A Made-for-TV Christmas Special airing the previous year (All This, and Christmas Too!, which also starred Carry On regular Kenneth Connor) had Rose Power playing a similarly stoney character to Evelyn Blunt and saying these same words to James.

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