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Spiritual Successor / Live-Action Films (N-Z)

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Spiritual Successor in Films.

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    N 

    O 
  • "O" is a high school version of Shakespeare's Othello.
  • Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon made a handful of movies that were all spiritual successors to the original The Odd Couple film. The spiritual successors began with Grumpy Old Men and included Grumpier Old Men and Out To Sea... the actual sequel, The Odd Couple II, was largely considered a lesser effort than all of the above.
  • Office Space, Mike Judge's satire of office jobs and the culture therein, is most likely the closest thing to a live-action Dilbert movie ever made.
  • The indie horror film Offseason, about a woman trapped in a resort town with a dark secret who had been drawn there by personal family business, has been compared to the Silent Hill games, albeit set in Florida with a Southern Gothic tone rather than New England. Many elements of both the aesthetic and the story, from the Ominous Fog to the seemingly abandoned setting to the crackling radios to the shifting landscape to the townsfolk worshiping a malevolent (and implicitly demonic) supernatural entity... they're all here.
  • Ever wondered what if Grand Theft Auto was set during the twilight of Hollywood's Golden Age, with the player getting to drive in 1969 Hollywood with the radio blaring period music, with a mission of getting to fight the members of the Manson Family? Look no further to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, specifically the day-to-day life of Cliff Booth.
  • Only Stwpd Cowz Txt N Drive: The film could be considered one to Lucky Luke, an educational film that Gwent Police made in the 1980s, in which a boy causes a terrible accident while joyriding. In the United States, one candidate could be Joy Ride: An Auto Theft, a 1976 driver's education movie also about a deadly accident while four teenagers are joyriding in a stolen vehicle.
  • Out of Darkness: The film feels a lot like an adaption of the classic William Golding's novel The Inheritors, with the prehistoric setting, eerie atmosphere, and being about the displacement of neanderthals by homo sapiens.
  • Overlord (2018):
    • It's an action-horror movie about a team of four paratroopers in Normandy (plus a photojournalist and a female French villager) the night before D-Day who discover Nazi mad science experiments to create undead Super Soldiers. In other words, it's Call of Duty: Zombies: The Movie.
    • The film's pulp sci-fi take on World War II can also make it seem like a film adaptation of Wolfenstein that they couldn't get the rights to. Tiago Svn and Ed Stevens of Cracked made note of it in this article, pointing out everything from the castle setting to the protagonist having a very similar facial scar to BJ's to specific plot and aesthetic elements right down to the fact that the title font is almost identical to that of Wolfenstein.
    • If anyone remembers the Xbox 360 game Operation Darkness, which had Those Wacky Nazis involved with the supernatural, then this is the closest to a movie adaptation of that game.
  • Oz the Great and Powerful is pretty much a non-musical movie adaptation of Wicked since it serves as an origin story to a prominent character in the Oz mythos (specifically Oscar Diggs) and the Wicked Witch of the West plays a big role throughout the story even going so far as to show her backstory of how she became evil just like the novel.

    P 
  • Pacific Rim, being Guillermo del Toro's love letter to classic Humongous Mecha anime, has been compared to many works in that genre.
    • Humanity building giant robots to combat an alien threat. While this may be a common plot in the mecha genre of anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion is probably the first show to come to mind for many, at least younger, anime fans. To specify: 20 Minutes into the Future (as opposed to the more common "far into the future" and "another world entirely" settings), aliens that are specifically interested in human extinction arrive, not from space, but from the depths of the Earth itself. These aliens are giant monsters who fight humanity directly, instead of using robots themselves. To combat these, humanity creates equally gigantic robots that requires the pilot to mentally synch not only with the robot, but also with a co-pilot. (While this is only done literally in Evangelion 3.0, in the original series the "robots" had to have a human soul implanted in them to function and both this soul and the actual pilot had to synch with each-other and the "robot".) The monsters also appear one-by-one instead of organizing in an army. Oh, and let's not forget the yellow fluid and the journeys into characters' minds. The sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising takes the similarities even further, introducing a counterpart to Shinji Ikari in the form of Jake Pentecost, the son of a war hero who was neglected growing up and is now in charge of piloting the mechas needed to save humanity, as well as sending the teenage rookies out in the mechas during the climax (albeit in this case after the adult pilots are killed or incapacitated).
    • Alternately alternately, it's the best Getter Robo movie we're ever gonna get.
    • Go back a bit more, to the beginning. Rocket Punch. Breast Fire. Pilots in the head docking with the body. Hell, the whole drivable robot concept. It's Mazinger Z, all the way. By extension to almost all the above, this makes Pacific Rim the closest to a live-action Super Robot Wars film ever.
    • The movie has several (coincidental) similarities to the X-COM franchise as well. Alien threat that forces the nations of the world to band together and form an organisation dedicated to fighting them? Check. Council of nations that threatens to pull their funding because they're not getting results? Check. The alien-fighting organization forced to sell alien components on the black market to make ends meet? Check. Researchers vivisecting alien corpses in order to better understand what they're fighting against? Check. A final assault on the aliens' homeworld? Check.
    • "Mysterious giant monsters are rising from the sea, and the nations of the world combat them by fielding stylish, two-pilot giant robots whose pilot teams all have a close relationship. On a tragic mission several years ago, our hero lost his trusted partner, and with a renewed crisis, he has to get back in his revived mecha with a new rookie girl who also serves as a love interest." Why, that sounds rather like Godannar.
    • Not mention it has been referred once or twice as an "adult" Power Rangers.
    • It's also the best screen-adaptation of Muv-Luv Alternative we could ever get.
  • Paddington (2014) to Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee. Instead of a magical nanny bringing harmony to a British family, it's a adorable little magical bear from Peru looking for a new home. Furthermore, while both Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee eventually leave their respctive families, Paddington stays.
  • Pandorum to Event Horizon. Two tales of cosmic terror, many see Pandorum as this century's Event Horizon.
  • Paranormal Activity to The Blair Witch Project. Just replace the search for a legendary witch with a demon haunting a young couple and they pretty much are the same movie.
  • Despite being based on a book series that was previously adapted as Point Blank (1967) and Payback, Parker could be seen as an ultra-violent remake of the Audrey Hepburn film How to Steal a Million as the two films share similar elements of a heist of priceless artifacts, the pairing of a gentleman thief with a female accomplice and stylish locales as their backdrops (Paris in How To Steal a Million, West Palm Beach in Parker).
  • Parker Lewis Can't Lose is seen as the Spiritual Successor to the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off; aside from the obvious grammatical parallels in the titles, both feature the same type of protagonist. In fact, it captured the feel and spirit of the movie much better than the mercifully short-lived series which was the official TV follow-up to the movie.
  • Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000) is this to his previous film Braveheart.
    • We Were Soldiers is another such historical war film with Gibson as the lead where he was reunited with the writer of Braveheart Randall Wallace who would also serve as the director that time around.
    • The Patriot is also one to Saving Private Ryan from the perspective of being an American-themed war film by Robert Rodat and was also scored by John Williams.
  • PCU is the spiritual successor to Animal House.
  • Moving backwards, Phantom of the Paradise is considered by many to be a spiritual predecessor to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Shock Treatment, both of which it shares quite a large number of similarities with.
    • Though "Phantom" came first — just barely - its scene of a muscular, gay Frankenstein monster with a blond pudding-bowl haircut being born inside a tank is so similar to "Rocky Horror" that some screenings of the latter have edited this sequence into the film as a joke.
    • A small number of fans feel that Shock Treatment was intentionally harking back to "Phantom" - in a number of ways, the new Brad and Janet ARE Winslow and Phoenix, complete with Jessica Harper damn near playing the same role again.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean:
    • The series is sometimes thought of as The Movies Of Monkey Island. If one were to see the trailer for the original Pirates of the Caribbean while being unaware of what it was actually based on, it wouldn't be a huge leap to expect it to be a straight-up Monkey Island movie. This isn't surprising, as both were inspired by the same theme park ride (after which the movie is named). The second PotC especially features a few uncanny similarities to the Monkey Island games, such as Jack using a casket as a rowboat and a voodoo priestess hiding in a swamp. (Both borrow the casket thing from Moby-Dick, though.)
    • The films also bear a strong resemblance to the marine horror stories of William Hope Hodgson, especially The Ghost Pirates and "The Derelict".
  • Pitch Perfect is the spiritual successor to Bring It On. Both movies focus on an uncommon competitive "sport" (cheerleading and a cappella singing). At the start, the former Senior/Head ("Big Red"/Alice), who is an Alpha Bitch threatens the new one. Pretty soon, the new Senior/Head, who is an uptight blonde (Torrance/Aubrey) is determined to do things the old way. Along the way, they bring in a quirky new person, who is also an introvert (Missy/Beca). The new person has a similar, but not identical skill (being a DJ instead of a cappella singing; gymnast instead of cheerleader). Eventually, the group washes out in early stages of competition. Then, the main girl and her cultured male friend (Cliff/Jesse) have a big fight. After a fluke allows the group back into competition, they must completely change their routine to win. From there, the new girl's alternative skill set is crucial to the change. Ultimately, they blow everyone away at the finals. Finally, the female lead and her edgy male friend have a big kiss at the end.
  • Pineapple Express is a Spiritual Successor to Superbad. Both being written by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, produced by Judd Apatow and Shauna Robertson, and distributed by Columbia Pictures. In fact, Pineapple Express was greenlit based on the early positive reaction to Superbad footage.
  • The Place Beyond the Pines is a spiritual successor to Drive (2011): Both characters were stuntmen who used vehicles as part of their employment, both were taken in and given a job in a low paying mechanic job where they found them selves doing a crooked sideline to make extra cash, they were also pretty soft spoken but had an air of understated charisma, they both ended up in a precarious predicament due to their criminal activity as well as getting angry with their boss/friend.
  • Polaroid is the closest thing to a film adaptation of the Goosebumps book Say Cheese and Die! we're going to get — both center around a cursed camera that does horrible things to anyone it takes a picture of, and both have major characters named Bird.
  • Power Rangers (2017):
    • While the movie is an adaptation of the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers season, its plot beats and casting choices have also been compared to Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, another Power Rangers season:
      • Both stories star a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who become Fire-Forged Friends while fighting against evil with dinosaur-themed powers and weapons.
      • The Rangers in the 2017 movie have powers in human form just like the Dino Thunder team.
      • In the original show, the Mighty Morphin team were recruited by Zordon because of their fighting skills and moral fiber. In the movie, they discover Zordon's base and the Power Coins completely by accident and Zordon has to make do with them despite them being far from his first choice as heroes. This makes the movie Mighty Morphin team much more similar to the Dino Thunder Rangers who became heroes the same way.
      • The Power Coins look more like crystals than coins making them more similar to the Dino Gems from Dino Thunder.
      • The villain has a personal connection to the Big Good and mentor.
      • The Big Good/mentor is a former Ranger himself.
    • Jason is reinterpreted as a Jerk Jock who is revealed to have a Hidden Heart of Gold just like Conner, the Red Ranger from Dino Thunder.
      • The movie Race Lifts Billy from white teenager to a black teenager while retaining his role as The Smart Guy. As a result, 2017 Billy is Black and Nerdy just like Ethan, the Dino Thunder Blue Ranger.
    • The film arguably works much better as an adaptation of Animorphs than Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It's about five mismatched teenagers (a quietly competent leader, his wisecracking friend, an empathic nature-loving tomboy, a girly-girl with an edgy streak, and an outcast loner from a broken home) developing superpowers and fighting an alien invasion following a fateful encounter in a construction site, the characters get their powers from an alien mentor who suffers Death by Origin Story, the Big Bad has the same superpowers as the heroes, and the climax features an important location hidden under a Real Life fast food restaurant (Krispy Kreme instead of McDonalds). The film was criticized by many Power Rangers fans for being considerably Darker and Edgier than the original show, but it has many of the elements that made Animorphs stand out: the characters have believably clashing personalities, it offers a (mostly) realistic portrayal of teenage issues, and it's ultimately a fairly grim and somber story about teenagers forced to become soldiers against their will. It even features a scene set on prehistoric Earth, where it's revealed that the dinosaurs were wiped out by aliens—which was a major plot point in one of the Animorphs books.
  • Predator is Beowulf, adapted to the 1980s and with an alien as Grendel. A group of elite warriors are called into a foreign land, where a mysterious creature is killing the locals. They manage to wound it once, but are slowly killed off until the leader sheds his armor and weapons to hunt down the beast.
  • Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley, was highly touted and received a couple of Oscar nods. The two got together for Atonement, a serious attempt at the awards.
  • Prisoners is likely the closest (and best) we'll get to a live action Heavy Rain, as its own film adaptation is seemingly locked in Development Hell.
  • The Prophecy series can be seen as a spiritual successor to the Highlander franchise. As it like its predecessor was created by Gregory Widen and has a mythos that centers around a secret conflict between immortals of mystical power not known to the masses. (Immortals and Angels respectively) Not to mention that there is only one very specific way that any members of these groups can be killed that involves removing a key body part (heads and hearts respectively).
  • The Professional is a Spiritual Successor to La Femme Nikita. Both movies were directed by Luc Besson and involve a "cleaner" hitman played by Jean Reno not to mention a young woman who trains to become an assassin. Likewise, Colombiana can be considered a successor to The Professional (it was supposed to be a sequel to that film titled Mathilda but it eventually became a Divorced Installment instead).
  • Years before Lois Duncan's novel I Know What You Did Last Summer got an official adaptation, Prom Night (1980) could be said to have been the best film version of it out there. (Duncan would probably say it's a better film, in fact, as she hated the I Know movie.) Both stories deal with a group of teenagers who had previously covered up an Accidental Murder, and are now being harassed and attacked over it by somebody who knows their secret.
  • Prometheus:
  • The Purge:
    • Some critics consider it to be The Hunger Games but with adults.
    • The sequels, The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year, are this to Manhunt minus the Snuff Film elements. A person (or a group of people in this case) try to survive the night against various gangs of masked psychopaths in a lawless city, including Gas Mask Mooks that look nearly like the Cerberus. Anarchy even has a plot line of the wealthy capturing victims to hunt for sport.
    • The character of Leo from Anarchy and Election Year, a Vigilante Man played by Frank Grillo who serves as a protagonist in both films, has been called a better translation of The Punisher to the big screen than many of that character's actual film adaptations. Both films as a whole have also been seen as Genre Throwbacks to '80s dystopian action films like Escape from New York and RoboCop (1987).
    • One writer has compared the films to the first BioShock game. To wit, while the films don't have that game's underwater city or genetic splicing, they do take place in a similar dystopian world where ultra-libertarian social Darwinism has caused society to degenerate into violent chaos for its own sake, justified by a Might Makes Right attitude. The masked psychos roaming the streets also resemble and behave like some of the more eccentric Splicers.
    • On a similar level, the series can also be seen as Dead Rising minus the zombies, such that Daniel Dockery of Cracked has suggested (at #1 on the list) that the films would work a lot better as video games drawing influence from Dead Rising. Both works take place against the backdrop of a breakdown of law and order that causes people to let their primal urges run wild, as seen with Dead Rising's psychopaths and The Purge's more colorful participants, many of whom see the collapse of society as an opportunity to throw off its shackles and fully embrace who they "really are". The action operates on a Cosmic Deadline; in the Dead Rising games (until the fourth one got rid of the timer), you only have a certain amount of time to complete the story before the military destroys the city, while participants in the Purge have only twelve hours to let loose and/or survive before the final siren. They also serve up highly cynical satire of American society, portraying it as a land where people are obsessed with guns and violence and can't be bothered to care about the dispossessed. The only difference is in how it happens: Dead Rising uses a Zombie Apocalypse as the catalyst, while the titular event in The Purge is an annual, government-sanctioned holiday.
    • James DeMonaco, the creator of the series, has cited as inspiration the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Return of the Archons", in which the Enterprise visits a planet holding a "Festival" where the Hive Mind temporarily relaxes its control over the populace and allows them to act out their most violent urges.

    R 
  • The Raid unintentionally becomes a movie adaption of the Dynamite Deka series, aka Die Hard Arcade and Dynamite Cop, by Indonesia (with a Welsh director). The movie has it all: a SWAT team infiltrating the building, a bad guy barking orders on the top floor, and waves upon waves of mooks on each floor. Even some movie critics said the movie feels like an adaption of arcade beat'em ups from the '90s.
  • Uwe Boll's Rampage is a better adaptation of Postal (particularly the first game in the series) than his own movie adaptation (which was based more on the second game).
  • The live-action adaption of Rampage (2018) was for a while the closest the a King Kong vs Godzilla movie for the 21st century until the MonsterVerse reached that point.
  • Rat Race is the spiritual successor to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
  • Ready Player One (2018) is known right now to be an adaption of several works:
    • It is not hard to imagine this as a film version of Garry's Mod. The premise, of being able to play and mess around in player-constructed environments and use iconic fictional characters as well as real historical people, is very similar to the game, just without the mechanics.
    • Others have compared it to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is helped by the usage of a Suspiciously Similar Song of "Pure Imagination" in the trailers (later confirmed to be an outright cover) and the fact that Gene Wilder himself was approached with the role of Halliday.
    • Some people, especially anime fans, also compared it a bit with resident MMO-gone-serious series Sword Art Online due to its premise, an opinion that seems to be shared by its own creator. Curiously enough and for enforcing this, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka, who voiced the main hero Kazuto Kirigaya/Kirito, works in the Japanese dub of the film.
    • The battle portion could be compared to South Park's Imaginationland trilogy/compilation movie, which culminates in a gigantic battle between good and evil armies consisting of hundreds of characters from pop culture and beyond.
    • The film can also be considered this to VRChat to some extent when it comes to modified avatars.
    • It could be also the closest thing to a Neptunia movie, but minus the sexual content.
  • The movie Real Steel had been called Rock'em Sock'em Robots: The Movie. It's actually an adaptation of the 1956 story and 1963 Twilight Zone episode "Steel", which in turn is said to have been the inspiration for Rock'em Sock'em Robots.
  • Rebel Moon: Just based on its aesthetic alone, it didn't take long for people to call this the closest live-action adaptation of Warhammer 40,000 we have so far.
  • Some critics have described Rebel Without a Cause as a 1950s Romeo and Juliet of sorts. Both deal with teenagers grappling with romance, violence, and alienation from the older generation and from society in general; James Dean's character Jim can be seen as the Romeo character, his love interest Judy as the Juliet, doomed friend/semi-love interest Plato as the Mercutio, and Judy's equally doomed original boyfriend Buzz as both Tybalt and Paris. Nicholas Ray actually cited Romeo as a strong influence on Rebel, calling it "the best play written about juvenile delinquents." These parallels may have helped pave the way for West Side Story, a more direct transplant of Romeo into the world of 1950s "juvenile delinquency," the 1961 film version of which starred the same leading actress as Rebel, no less.
  • The [REC] movies have been compared to what the Resident Evil (2002) and Doom movies should have been.
  • Red Rocket is the spiritual successor to The Florida Project because it's set in the far South of the USA (Texas and Florida) among lower class characters in midsummer where the protagonists (or co-lead in Halley's case) are sex workers - Halley is a prostitute and Mikey is a (technically ex) porn star. Red Rocket can also be seen as the Spiritual Antithesis to Florida because for all of Halley's jerk behavior, she is a vulnerable girl and Struggling Single Mother with sympathetic traits. Mikey, on the other hand, is charming, but is ultimately a manipulative and misogynistic predator.
  • When it was announced, Red Sparrow was frequently described as "the unofficial Black Widow movie", albeit with Jennifer Lawrence instead of Scarlett Johansson and a general lack of superheroes. The film's director Francis Lawrence even commented on the comparisons.
  • Discussed in Reservoir Dogs, where the guys have a Seinfeldian Conversation about the 1970s cult TV show Get Christie Love!. Nice Guy Eddie incorrectly recalls that Pam Grier played Christie Love, and Mr. Pink clarifies that Pam Grier was exclusively a film actress, while Get Christie Love! was meant to be "the Pam Grier TV show without Pam Grier".
  • Due to copious amounts of Gorn, grim tone, and similar time period, some have felt that The Revenant is about the closest we have gotten to a film version of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
  • The film Revolutionary Road is an interesting subversion of Spiritual Successor status. It's set in America, it starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (as husband in wife) in their first film together after they'd co-starred in Titanic (1997). Some people initially thought it therefore as Titanic's spiritual successor. The storyline, however, is, if anything, entirely the opposite of Titanic and only gets worse from there. Plus, it's based on a completely unrelated novel.
  • The 2015 zombie film The Rezort is about an island resort complex built after a Zombie Apocalypse where tourists can come to hunt zombies for sport. While the Jurassic Park-with-zombies inspirations are obvious, it can also be seen as a film version of Dead Island, although in this case, the zombies are supposed to be there.
  • Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game, the adaptation of which took decades to premiere, considers Rise of the Planet of the Apes to be "the first truly successful adaptation of my novel... to appear on the screen." In the past, he'd made similar statements about Serenity.
  • Graham Dury of Viz considers the 1987 British comedy Rita and Sue and Bob, Too to be a better film adaptation of Fat Slags than the eponymous film.
  • The Road can be seen as an unintentional spiritual successor to Road to Perdition as they share many similar themes (apart from the title involving "road" that can easily be confused). Both center around the relationship between a father and son who have nothing left but each other (in both cases he had a wife but she's dead) who through events beyond their control are forced to travel down a "road" both literally and metaphorically trying to survive whilst bringing up questions about morality- the father trying to be a good man doing what's best for his son, trying to find a place for themselves and running into problems on the way, including people who want to kill them. Even the endings are similar, as they both involve them coming to the end of their journey with the father dying but the boy seemingly going off to a better life (although how much better his life becomes in The Road is debatable, given the apocalyptic setting).
  • Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has two films that are spiritual successors. Ironically enough the two follows-ups are based upon an Alexandre Dumas story, each was produced by Disney, and all three films feature Michael Wincott in the role of a major supporting antagonist...
    • The Three Musketeers (1993) gives off the vibe of deliberately aiming to be a spiritual successor to Prince of Thieves which came out two years prior. Both were re-iterations of classic stories of swashbuckling heroism, taking several liberties in the process, that center around a rag-tag group of heroes. Both star an awesomely over-the-top antagonist who has received a "Villain Upgrade" of sorts, given how the Sheriff and Richelieu now plot to take over their respective nations with plans that involve them getting with a woman of nobility. Both films also have scores by Michael Kamen and have a pop song attached featuring Bryan Adams.
    • The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) was a following swashbuckling adventure film based on a classic European tale from the same director of Prince of Thieves, Kevin Reynolds. Both films featuring a few similar plot elements like centering around a lead hero who after a long time imprisoned returns home to find his life in shambles including the death of his father, the hero decides to fight to seek justice/revenge against those responsible, has a sidekick in the form of a man who owes him a life debt, etc.
  • RoboCop (1987) is basically an adaptation of Judge Dredd, being the story of a visor-wearing supercop hunting criminals in the dystopian metropolis of the future, complete with political satire and Black Comedy. In fact, there were plans for a film adaptation long before the 1995 Stallone version, but the release of RoboCop scuppered it.
  • The Rocketeer:
    • The film is the spiritual successor to the Indiana Jones series.
    • The film is for all intents and purposes the Art Deco Batman or Superman movie people have been crying for.
  • The Rookie is essentially this to Dirty Harry. In both movies, Clint Eastwood plays a veteran cop whose partners are killed. The movie is also directed by Clint Eastwood.
  • Right after directing The Outsiders Francis Ford Coppola made a movie based on another SE Hinton novel, Rumble Fish with many of the same cast and crew. The movie came out months after The Outsiders.
  • Runaway Bride is the spiritual successor to Pretty Woman (shared lead couple, same director).
  • Run Hide Fight is about as close as anybody is ever going to get to making a film adaptation of the Newgrounds game Pico's School, albeit with a gender-flipped protagonist. Both are unabashedly pulpy "Die Hard" on an X stories about school shootings, in which the protagonist is a student who fights back against a gang of four nihilistic, antisocial classmates who represent contemporary teen delinquent stereotypes (goths in Pico's School, social media addicts in Run Hide Fight), all while the police outside do nothing to stop them.
  • Rurouni Kenshin would make for a good live-action epilogue for Total War: Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai.

    S 
  • The 2015 disaster film San Andreas is essentially the first act of 2012 stretched out into a feature film, even containing many of the tropes that Roland Emmerich used in his disaster flicks.
  • Le Samouraï has influenced numerous filmmakers over the years so naturally there have been some movies that serve as unofficial remakes:
    • The Driver is an Americanized version of the movie but with a getaway driver.
    • John Woo cited the film as a major inspiration for The Killer (1989) in terms of plot and characters. He even admitted in an interview that "Melville is god to me" and it's no surprise that he's been attempting to remake Le Samourai for years but his efforts never came to fruition so in the meantime fans of the film can look to The Killer as the closest that they'll get to the director's vision of a modern, setting-shifted reboot
    • The Professional is a 90s themed version of the film set in New York City. Not only is the protagonist a very skilled hitman who's always dressed well for his assassination missions but he adheres to a rigid Code of Honor and lives as an outsider who has no other friends or companions other than a thing that he keeps at his apartment. He also has to protect a young girl and eventually sacrifices himself to save her from death. And much like that movie, the director Luc Besson is French.
    • Similar to The Killer example above, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a deliberate homage to the movie complete with an Anti-Hero contract killer as the main lead who follows the Japanese code of Bushido and uses a special key to steal other cars. He even dies at the end to project a young woman much like Jef Costello.
    • As the film's own page on TV Tropes points out, The American is Le Samourai in Italy.
  • In Roger Ebert's review of The Sandlot, he proposes that the movie is this to A Christmas Story. A real sequel, It Runs In The Family came out the next year, and most people don't even know its exists. The Sandlot, on the other hand, is considered a classic.
  • Savages, like Double Impact listed above, also has the basic plotline of the first Double Dragon game. Criminals have kidnapped the girlfriend of two guys who now have to battle their way to get her back.
  • Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) is at least partially one for his earlier film Schindler's List (1993). They're both dramas about World War II that use the subject as a vehicle for examining the value of human life, and both of them are famous for their uniquely stylized visual presentations (Schindler's List is filmed entirely in black and white save for a single girl in a red coat, and Saving Private Ryan uses Shaky Cam and a desaturated color palettenote ). The chief difference between the two films is in their perspectives: Schindler's List is a film about the Holocaust told from a German perspective, while Saving Private Ryan is a film about the invasion of France told from an American perspective.
  • The eighth Saw film, Jigsaw, has been seen as a surprisingly close adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, which it gives a highly prominent Shout-Out to. While it's not actually set in Hell, the main game, like the story of No Exit, revolves around a group of criminal people who can be redeemed from their suffering by simply confessing their sins to Jigsaw in front of the people around them — yet all of them are too proud to do, afraid of the shame that this would cause them and the judgment that they would receive from those around them, resulting in them paying the price. There are even very close parallels between the crimes committed by Estelle in No Exit and Anna in Jigsaw, the two of them having both killed their infant children in such a manner that drove their lovers to suicide.
  • Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed is considered by many as a film adaptation of Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights due to how similar the plot is and how faithful they are to the cartoons.
  • The Scorpion King is considered to be a better adaptation of Conan the Barbarian due to costuming, style, and story than the first Arnold Schwarzenegger film. Considering that John Milius was interested in making a Viking movie instead of a Conan movie, it's not that hard.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World:
    • Despite being an adaptation of a comic that came out years before, the film has been said to be the closest thing to a movie adaption of No More Heroes.
    • Some fans would argue that this is the closest thing they could have a live-action adaptation of Revolutionary Girl Utena. While the original comic book also made a reference to the anime, the franchise share the similar theme with it as well.
  • Scream (1996):
    • It can be considered the spiritual successor to the obscure '80s slasher film Return to Horror High. Not only does the killer in both movies have a black cloak and a white featureless mask, but Return to Horror High was very post-modern for a film of its age: it is about a director making a horror movie about a series of unsolved murders happening in a high school, set in that same school, where the actors playing the parts of the students are getting murdered in "real life"; there's the conflict between the scriptwriter of the film and the director who only wants tits & blood, and the actresses that complain of being used only as fanservice...
    • It was a more overt successor to Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a 1994 slasher by Scream's director Wes Craven that explored similar metatextual ideas about the relationship between horror movies, their fans, and their creators. Both are about a massacre straight out of an '80s Slasher Movie happening in the "real world", though Scream was a more grounded, Genre Savvy take on the concept compared to the supernatural, fourth-wall-breaking New Nightmare.
  • Scrubbers, a drama set in a girls' prison, is mostly a Gender Flip of Scum, a drama set in a boys' prison. Roy Minton wrote Scum and co-wrote Scrubbers, but the stories are not connected. The two films are sometimes packaged together.
  • The Secret of My Success can be seen as a sequel to Family Ties, since Brantley is pretty much the same character as Alex P. Keaton. Brantley's family can be seen as a severely Flanderized version of the Keatons. (In fact in Family Ties' take on A Christmas Carol it's revealed that in one possible future the Keatons actually became farmers after a downturn in the economy.) It helps that the last episode of Family Ties ends where The Secret of My Success begins (even though the movie was released two years before the last episode aired!)
    • Working Girl meanwhile, could be seen as a female version of The Secret of My Success. It's also about a working class person who pretends to be someone they aren't in order to get ahead in the corporate world. Working Girl all in all, could be seen as a film that combines the setting of Wall Street, the workplace ensemble ethos of Broadcast News, the plot of The Secret of My Success, and the women-get-one-over-on-the-boss mentality of 9 to 5.
  • The Seven-Ups is a spiritual successor to The French Connection in that it stars Roy Scheider as a New York detective similar to the one he played in the latter movie and had the same producer and composer and even had a car chase like the one in The French Connection.
  • According to director Danny Boyle there's a sly connection between Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. Keith Allen portrays a drug dealer in both films — with the intention that we think he may be the same character in both, as Trainspotting was suppose to take place in the late 1980s before the occurrences in Shallow Grave.
  • Shaolin Soccer to the Yuen Biao film The Champions (1983). Both movies are soccer-themed sports comedies about a country bumpkin who is an expert in martial arts but out of a job, then ends up using his skills participating in soccer games and making it big.
  • She's All That is a high school version of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.
  • Shin Godzilla is the best big-budget crossover between Godzilla and The West Wing never made. If you've ever wanted to see how President Bartlet and his band of True Companions might deal with an attack by a city-destroying monster (and you don't mind them speaking in Japanese), this movie gives you a pretty damn good idea.
  • The Shining:
  • Short Circuit is a spiritual successor to WarGames. Both films are directed by John Badham and starred Ally Sheedy as a person helping a military AI (the Joshua/WOPR supercomputer/Johnny Five) learn the importance of life.
  • Showdown in Little Tokyo and Black Rain is as close one can get to a movie version of SNK's Burning Fight.
  • Side Effects is the closest you'll ever get to seeing the Half-Life mod Afraid of Monsters in film.
  • Slither is essentially a CGI-era version of Night of the Creeps in a more rustic setting.
  • Sleepers:
    • It can be viewed as the spiritual predecessor of Spotlight in that it deals with sexual abuse of young boys carried out by men in a position of power, which is covered up by those in the know. It helps that Billy Crudup appears as one of the adult sleepers in this movie and as an attorney in Spotlight. A major dissimilarity between the two films, however, is that in Sleepers the catholic church is a safe haven and a place of comfort and security, and the priest they interact with the most is a protective father figure.
    • The way Michael and Shakes communicate during the trial, and the secrecy involved with the whole operation, brings to mind All the President's Men. Roger Ebert even compared the two of them.
  • Snatch. is such a picturesque thematic follow-up to Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels (having the same writer/director, Guy Ritchie, focusing on British gangsters, and snarky quick-written humor) that it can almost be thought of as more of a Spin-Off than anything.
  • Snow Day was originally written as a film adaptation of The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and it shows.
  • Snow Dogs could be considered such to Cool Runnings. Both are live-action family films from Disney that are fish out of water tales that involve one or more people going from their warm/comfortable environment to a cold and snowy place where they engage in some sort of winter sport. Both films also share some screenwriters. Those being Tommy Swerdlow and Michael Goldberg.
  • Snowpiercer
    • This video by CrayTrey argues that it is the best BioShock film adaptation ever made, specifically the kind of BioShock movie that Terry Gilliam would make. (It even has a character named Gilliam as a possible Shout-Out.) Even discounting the fact that the protagonists' journey to the front of the train is structured like a video game, both are set in hermetically sealed environments filled with claustrophobic corridors where escape is made impossible by hostile conditions outside, with stratified societies overseen by the eccentric billionaires who created these places in line with their flawed personal ideologies (Objectivism in the case of BioShock's Andrew Ryan, Ecofascist feudalism in the case of Snowpiercer's Wilford). Curtis Everett, the protagonist of Snowpiercer, can also be seen as a more heroic version of Frank Fontaine from BioShock in his rebellion against Wilford. It even has a climatic scene very similar to Andrew Ryan's big speech to Jack in BioShock, a Fantastic Drug that has driven many people insane, the exploitation of children being a key component of the systems that keep things running, and society going down in flames by the end. Furthermore, while BioShock sought to deconstruct the Objectivist themes of Rand's Atlas Shrugged, one could see the villains here as the kind of bad guys that Rand herself could have written. Wilford is a fascist tyrant who preaches that salvation comes from serving him, Gilliam is a socialist tyrant who preaches that salvation comes from serving each other (at his command, of course), and the two of them are working together to maintain the train and its oppressive system.
    • Similarly, this video by Rhino Stew calls it a Darker and Edgier sequel to Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Specifically, he pegs Wilford as a grown-up Charlie Bucket who took Willy Wonka's (or rather, Wilford Wonka's) name after he inherited the factory, along with numerous shout-outs and similarities in the supporting cast and in various plot details. This video by Nomadic Kong builds on the theory, arguing that the plot of Snowpiercer draws direct parallels and homages to Charlie's 1971 film adaptation, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, right down to specific scenes that are nearly identical and even the use of "Pure Imagination" in the score.
      "They're both two movies about groups of people that work their way through a large, fantastic structure. One by one, a person from the group is removed in each room, until one person makes it to the very end, who then found out that the entire thing was a test because a wealthy industrialist needed to find a new successor."
  • The Speed Racer film is just as viable an adaptation of F-Zero as it is of the Speed Racer anime.
  • The Spirit may not have captured the, uh, spirit of the comics it came from very well, but it's a much better adaptation of an entirely different superhero: The Tick. Just compare how often they run across rooftops while monologuing about "MY CITY!" and invoking tortured metaphors.
  • At times, Spring Breakers feels like either the best Grand Theft Auto: Vice City adaptation ever made, or a deconstruction of such. It's got the Florida setting (albeit set in St. Petersburg instead of a pastiche of Miami), the neon-drenched style that heavily evokes The '80s (despite being set in the present day), the sociopathic Villain Protagonists running headfirst across the Moral Event Horizon because "spring break, bitches!", and a winking self-awareness of its own "gangsta" attitude that's used to satirize pop culture's obsession with cool criminals. By extension, it also has some of the GTA series' few female protagonists, and the only ones with any defined personality.note 
  • Another attempt at a Blade Runner sequel (written by David Webb Peoples, co-writer of Blade Runner) became the blueprint for the Kurt Russell film Soldier.
  • Some fans have argued that Solo is a better successor to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade than the actual most recent Indiana Jones film. Both movies open with a Harrison Ford character in his teenage years and show us how he got to be who he is, and feature him allying with an older father figure (Henry Jones/Beckett), his brave and warm-hearted sidekick (Sallah/Chewie), and his lovely female companion (Elsa/Qi'ra) to retrieve something priceless for a villainous rich guy (Donovan/Dryden), while being pursued by an elite band of brigands who turn out to be good guys (Kazim and the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword/Enfys Nest and the Cloud-Riders.) There's an action sequence on a train at one point, and both films end with the girl killing the rich guy, who turns grey as he dies, the father figure being shot, and the hero not getting the girl when she ultimately abandons him too.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) is regarded by fans as a Live-Action Adaptation of Sonic X. Both are about Sonic getting put into the human world and ends up befriending some humans in order to hide from the government.
  • Spartacus was a major influence on what are arguably the two most popular historical epics of the modern era, and has been cited as such by their respective directors. Both coming off as being quite similar in spirit...
    • Braveheart is structurally quite similar to Spartacus, though many of the details are quite different. Each is the story of a low-standing man within an oppressed group who manages to rise up and become a great leader in battling the foreign group seeking to oppress them. Both doing so after a major loss. The lead villain is an extremely high ranking man who seeks to consolidate and expand his own power. His side however early on does not take the rebellion seriously and thinks lowly of them, which is something that both the Romans and the English pay for. The two leaders manage to find great success and even start up a (new) romance. After a major betrayal at a key moment however, facilitated by the lead villain buying off important allies, things turn south with the hero's losing and eventually being captured. The hero never submits however, and thus winds up being sentenced to a cruel execution. (Both ending up dying on a cross of some sort no-less) However both have managed to succeed in sending their message to the world, and the audience is left knowing that they actually have conceived a child who will get to live on past him.
    • Gladiator in many respects is a lot like Spartacus in reverse. One character starting out as a slave/gladiator who manages to rise up into a great, powerful, and respected military leader. While the other starts out as a great, powerful, and respected military leader who winds up being torn down into being a slave/gladiator. However the share certain elements, including a lead villain who is seeking to manipulate the people (though through drastically different means) in order to consolidate his power and essentially supplant the Senate with a lot of political subterfuge and intrigue ensuing as a result. Both also having supporting characters in a gladiator school owner who starts out focusing on making a profit but becomes a key player in the main conflict, as Gladiator having what appears to be a deliberate shout-out to the previous film in the form of having a major character called Senator Gracchus. The Gracchus' in either film being the chief antagonist's main political rival who is fighting for the rights and continued authority of the senate. And again, like Braveheart as well, the lead heroes of both films ultimately die as martyrs.
  • Special Female Force is a spiritual successor to the The Inspector Wears Skirts film series, the theme being a Girls with Guns action comedy film about an all-female police squad.
  • Speed Zone is a spiritual successor to The Cannonball Run.
  • Starship Troopers is a spiritual successor to RoboCop (1987). Released ten years apart from each other, both are directed by Paul Verhoeven, share similar themes and are structured around mock broadcasts of news and information.
  • Star Wars:
    • George Lucas originally wanted to do an adaptation of Flash Gordon, but couldn't afford the rights. Instead, he decided to make his own original story, influenced by Flash Gordon and the stories that influenced such in turn, particularly Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars. Interestingly, the success of A New Hope led directly to a proper Flash Gordon adaptation three years later.
    • Hari Kunzru, writing for The Guardian, called it the best Dune adaptation ever made, between its New Age-inflected Science Fantasy setting, the similarities between the Jedi and the Bene Gesserit, and Tattooine, the desert planet full of hooded tribesmen where The Chosen One emerges from, being remarkably similar to Arrakis. Frank Herbert himself noticed the similarities and had mixed feelings. His son Brian said that, after watching Star Wars, his father "picked out sixteen points of what he called 'absolute identity' between his book and the movie" and, together with other writers who saw similar inspiration from their own stories in Star Wars, formed a joke organization called the "We're Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society".
    • Rogue One is effectively what Dark Forces would be like if it had been a movie. An unusual example of this trope in that both works are part of the same franchise, albeit Alternate Continuities. It also draws elements from the Han Solo trilogy of novels, given that Jyn Erso has parallels to Han Solo's former flame Bria Tharen, who became a significant Rebel officer who died stealing the Death Star plans. Likewise, the second part of the movie could be a live-action adaptation of X-Wing, since the game also depicts space battles in which parts of the Death Star plans were stolen even if the participants are different.
    • The Last Jedi:
      • To FTL: Faster Than Light. Both have the protagonists get tracked and chased by the antagonists even as they perform Faster-Than-Light Travel, with the latter being a galactic supremacist group whose fleet vastly outnumbers the former's.
      • It can also be considered a film version of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, as a Deconstruction of Star Wars, particularly the Jedi-Sith conflict, that stars a female main characternote . Both the film and the game follow installments that played franchise-wide tropes relatively straight and hit familiar story beats.
  • Steve Jobs to The Social Network, another biopic written by Aaron Sorkin about an abrasive tech pioneer with a troubled love life, who has a falling-out with a close friend who accuses him of Stealing the Credit for his big breakthrough. Funnily enough, the two films were almost directed by the same person, but David Fincher passed on directing Steve Jobs.
  • Strange Days is essentially an unofficial sequel to Brainstorm, showing the effect on society after the thought-recording technology invented in Brainstorm becomes mass-produced.
  • By Steven E DeSouza's admission, the Street Fighter movie was more of a G.I. Joe movie than a Street Fighter one, due to to the heavy military elements (which are not nearly as prevalent in the games), as well as Hasbro's involvement with the merchandising.
    Capcom had forged a partnership with Hasbro long before production began to warp the G.I. Joe toy line into Street Fighter: The Movie licensed dolls, just in time for Black Friday. "You can look at this movie as the first G.I. Joe movie," says De Souza, "Because G.I. Joe was in a swamp at this time. It was not selling. So Hasbro wanted to reboot the G.I. Joe line by thinly disguising it as Street Fighter."
  • Street Kings:
    • The film feels a lot like Max Payne, only set on a hot night in Los Angeles rather than a cold night in New York.
    • The film has been compared to Training Day. In fact, if you just alter the final 20 minutes of Training Day, it would be a direct sequel.
  • Streets of Fire to The Warriors. Both are directed by Walter Hill and feature heavily stylized versions of street crime at night.
  • Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge! form Baz Lurhmann’s Thematic Series The Red Curtain Trilogy. Each film is a Spiritual Successor to the last one, as each focuses on a different element of theatre: dance, poetry, and song, respectively.
  • Sunset Boulevard grew out of Billy Wilder's attempt to do a film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. Wilder couldn't secure the rights for the novella, so he concocted a different Horrible Hollywood tale with a similar tone and a few of the same motifs. The Loved One finally got a film adaptation 15 years later.
  • Sunshine to Supernova. Two scifi sun-related adventorous movies.
  • A good number of online reviewers, including The Nostalgia Critic, have argued that the true spiritual successor to Superman: The Movie is Wonder Woman. Both are highly idealistic DC Comics superhero films about a dark-haired, non-human protagonist who is sent to the world of men from "the world of the gods" by a parent or parents to fulfill their destiny as a savior of mankind, and both take steps to emphasize that the hero's true power is their idealism and belief in the goodness of human beings. The main character disguises their identity with a pair of glasses, has a snarky Badass Normal love interest, and there's even a scene where Diana catches bullets fired at Steve as a direct reference to Superman: The Movie. A major theme involves the protagonist learning humility and shedding their naivete while confronting a campy middle-aged man as the villain (with a female sidekick), and the climax has features the love interest dying, although unlike Superman, Diana is unable to turn back time to save Steve Trevor. Till the sequel, at least.
  • The western comedies Support Your Local Sheriff and Support Your Local Gunfighter were made by more-or-less the same production crew and cast, and share much in terms of theme and tone, but the second is not a sequel to the first, and no characters reappear.
  • Tim Burton's version of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street could be the spiritual successor to Sleepy Hollow (1999) - When Johnny Depp's character brings his gorgeous blonde wife back to the city things go horribly wrong, and then they get worse.

    T 
  • Taken:
    • Before the film had actual sequels, there was the film Unknown (2011) which also starred Liam Neeson as a badass fighting his way through a European city to try and save a family member and during the marketing phase seemed to actually be often mistaken for a Taken sequel.
    • A lot of viewers have noted that the first Taken movie as the closest thing there is to big screen adaptation of 24, minus the more political aspects. Similar to the show, it involves an ex-government agent having to jump back into action to save his daughter (who coincidentally is also named Kim) within a time limit, and said protagonist has a thing for employing methods of Pay Evil unto Evil into the crooks who come his way, especially the poor misguided idiots who dared to harm his loved ones. A few actors who appeared in the show even have roles in the film. Bonus points for the fact that the time limit of hours the protagonist of is given, 96, is a multiple of the number 24.
  • Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is regarded as the spiritual successor to the Creepshow series (while ironically, Creepshow 3 is disavowed by fans as an In Name Only work). After all, it's a macabre horror anthology with writing by Stephen King and George Romero, and work by Tom Savini (who in fact went on record as saying that Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is the "real" Creepshow 3), and was originally going to be the third Creepshow installment until producers decided to cash in on the Tales from the Darkside name.
  • Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is the Spiritual Successor to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (and indeed was described by Ferrell as the third of his "unreasonably confident people" series).
  • Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy:
    • Cracked's David Wong once expressed this opinion about Shaun of the Dead, opining that it was one of the first movies ever to successfully bring Douglas Adams' unique brand of humor to the big screen, even if Adams didn't actually have anything to do with it. Adding to the irony, he argued that the movie captured Adams' style far better than the actual The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), which was released exactly one year after it.
    • Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End form a Thematic Series called the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy. They're written and directed by the same people, feature similar cast members (drawing from an extended Production Posse), and combine violence and "genre" storylines with comedy. Most importantly, they each feature a prominent Cornetto ice cream flavor.
  • Gerry Anderson has actually said that Team America: World Police is a better adaptation of his Thunderbirds than the actual live-action Thunderbirds film, though he also felt that Team America's raunchiness hurt it, since it meant his kids couldn't watch.
  • This Is the End, a Hollywood satire about a bunch of rich, pampered, obnoxious celebrities (failing to) survive the apocalypse in their fortified mansion, is the best adaptation of the Long Island chapter of World War Z ever made, albeit with the apocalypse in question being Biblical rather than undead.
  • Blumhouse's Thriller (2018) on Netflix is a blatant ripoff of Prom Night (1980). Both slasher films open with a child falling to their death due to a Deadly Prank, with the kids responsible vowing to keep the secret. Both films skip ahead to the kids' senior year of high school before a big dance (the senior prom in Prom Night, the homecoming dance in Thriller) before someone who saw the prank targets them all at the dance. There's also an extended chase scene that's almost an exact duplicate. The films have so many similarities in fact, that Thriller is a far more faithful adaptation of Prom Night than its own official remake.
  • THX 1138 is what would've happen if Jean-Luc Godard made a film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World.
  • A Time to Kill is a spiritual follow-up to the preceding Joel Schumacher directed film based off of a John Grisham legal thriller novel The Client.
  • Three of the early IMAX space films fit together in a loose sort of way— To Fly! (1976) summarizes history of air and space travel up to that point in time, ending with the launch of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Hail Columbia! (1982) covers NASA's next human spaceflight after the ASTP— STS-1, the first launch of the space shuttle, highlights the transition from the Apollo program to the space shuttle era, and features astronaut Robert Crippen taking his first spaceflight as STS-1's pilot. The Dream Is Alive (1985) shows the shuttle in its first flush of success ending just before the Challenger disaster, as it carries full crews and launches and repairs satellites, with two of the missions followed showing Crippen having advanced to Shuttle Commander, teaching the ropes to new pilots who are where he was in Hail Columbia!
  • To Live and Die in L.A. is this to The French Connection. Most notably, both films have the same director, feature lengthy car chases and have protagonists determined to take the villain down no matter the cost.
  • The movie Tomboy can be seen as a Spiritual Successor to the Ma Vie En Rose movie released 14 years earlier. They both center around children, the first explicitly an 8 year old trans girl, the other around a possible 10 year old trans boy, while if not that a cross-dressing girl who may be lesbian), are French language, and have the "Just moved to a new town" premise.
  • Tomb Raider (2018) is obviously based on the video game franchise of the same name (specifically its 2013 reboot), but with the changes made to the story in the translation to the big screen, it also works as a solid adaptation of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Whereas Lara Croft's goal in the 2013 game was to rescue her friend Sam and get off the island, with discovering the tomb of Himiko being simply a means to that end, here she's racing a team of men led by Mathias Vogel to find Himiko's tomb, just as Nathan Drake was racing a team of men led by Gabriel Roman to find El Dorado in Uncharted. The twists on the true nature of the treasure they're seeking are also nearly identical. In a case of Doing In the Wizard, it turns out here that Himiko wasn't a supernatural villain like she was in the game, but rather, an immune carrier of a disease that turns people into rampaging psychopaths — not unlike what El Dorado turned out to be in Uncharted.
  • Tommy Boy, a disastrous road trip starring a mismatched Odd Couple and the gradual destruction of a car, owes a lot to Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
  • The box office disaster Torque was a spiritual successor to The Fast and the Furious, even having the same producer and featuring the crime and racing genres.
  • A sequel was planned for Blade Runner, and after the script was rewritten and handed down through several different creative teams, it eventually reached the screen as Total Recall (1990). The same process led from Total Recall (1990) to Minority Report. The actual direct sequel to Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, would not come out until 2017. All three movies are based on works by Philip K. Dick.
  • Tour de Pharmacy is this to 7 Days in Hell. Both of them are very raunchy HBO sports mockumentaries about a fictional sporting event with an All-Star Cast, Andy Samberg in a leading role, and feature several celebrities playing themselves. They're also both period piecesnote  that base its humor off of the sheer absurdity of the event they're documenting.
  • Train to Busan can be the closest thing South Korea can have their own adaptation of Stephen King's stories as both share similar allegory, themes, and tones with his body of works (The Stand, The Mist, Cell, and The Langoliers to name a few).

    U 

    V 
  • It's been said that Valley of the Dolls, Mommie Dearest, and Showgirls form a loose trilogy of campy films about women attempting to climb their way to the top in show business. All three films were intended to be serious dramas, but suffer from serious scenery chewing and were critically panned upon release, but found new followings as cult classics.
  • Victoria & Abdul is a spiritual successor to Mrs Brown, both being the story of Queen Victoria, played by Judi Dench, and her friendship with a male servant. In fact the only thing stopping it being an official sequel is that it was made by a different production company.
  • The little-known Canadian sci-fi/horror flick The Vindicator is a spiritual predecessor to RoboCop (1987). Both films involve a man who is murdered and then resurrected as a cyborg.

    W 
  • War, Inc. is the spiritual successor to Grosse Pointe Blank. They both feature John Cusack as a hitman having doubts about his career choice with Joan Cusack as his assistant and Dan Aykroyd in a supporting role.
  • Wasabi is a spiritual successor to another spiritual successor The Professional. It was written and produced by Luc Besson with Jean Reno playing a badass killer in a big city who has to protect a young girl from crooks and has a favorite dish that he craves to eat/drink.
  • What We Did on Our Holiday is a Spiritual Successor to Out Numbered. It was created by the same people - Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin - and features three adorable and unwittingly wisecracking children (with a generous helping of Harpo Does Something Funny and Throw It In! to their dialogue), put-upon parents, and comedy from unexpected situations.
  • Where Hands Touch is this to A United Kingdom, which is this to Belle (2013). All are directed by Amma Asante and all focus on a little-known, but significant race story—the plight of the so-called "Rhineland Bastards" (mixed race children born to German women and French/African soldiers who are among the lesser-known victims of the Holocaust), the love story of Seretse Khana and his wife Ruth, and the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, respectively.
  • Where the Sidewalk Ends is very much this to Laura. Both directed by Otto Preminger and starring Dana Andrews as a disillusioned New York cop named Mark who falls in love with characters played by Gene Tierney. Mark Dixon in Where the Sidewalk Ends could easily be Mark McPherson from Laura, ten years later and now more jaded, cynical, and violent.
  • Preminger's Whirlpool was described by Jose Ferrer as "like a sequel to Laura — it had the same star, the same mood and atmosphere."
  • White Christmas serves as this to Holiday Inn. Both are classic holiday centric musicals that star Bing Crosby as an established musical performer who finds love. And both films have an inn serve as a primary location, as well as music by Irving Berlin. Both prominently feature the song White Christmas. The connections were fully intentional, and Crosby's Holiday Inn co-star Fred Astaire was actually offered the part as the other male lead but declined. Leading to the role going to Danny Kaye. And it would even turn out that the two films use the same set for their respective inns.
  • Wild Things, a darkly comic erotic thriller set in Florida about a complex web of lies and betrayal, is widely considered to be a much better Carl Hiaasen adaptation than many of the actual adaptations of his novels. It came out just two years after the critically panned Striptease, which actually was based on one of his novels.
  • Willy's Wonderland is blatantly a Five Nights at Freddy's movie all but in name with the exact same premise of a silent, average protagonist that has to deal with demonic animatronics out to kill him at a decrepit family restaurant that has a dark past. The only differences are that the protagonist is a janitor who only agreed to take up the job to fix his car instead of a security guard who willingly signs up for the occupation and rather than being alone, he has help from a group of teens to fight off the animatronics. And compared to The Banana Splits Movie, Willy's Wonderland is even more similar to FNAF. The movie even shares the same plot twist of demonic animatronics possessed by serial killers just like William Afton/Springtrap in the game.
  • In South Korea, the film Windstruck is considered to be the spiritual successor to the wildly popular romantic comedy My Sassy Girl. Both were written and directed by Kwak Jae-Yong and starred Jeon Ji-Hyun. Of course, Windstruck should almost be considered a spiritual prequel, as its end is a painfully obvious allusion to its predecessor, with two future lovers meeting at a train station.
  • Screenwriter Terence Winter and director Martin Scorsese have essentially noted that The Wolf of Wall Street does with white-collar crime what Goodfellas and Casino do with organized crime. Wolf of Wall Street has also been compared with Wall Street and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps , with many calling Jordan Belfort a modern day Gordon Gekko, this being a Thematic Series trilogy called by fans as The Wall Street Trilogy.
  • The Woman of My Dreams: There are some striking similarities between this 1944 film made in Nazi Germany and the 1935 American film In Person with Ginger Rogers: Romantic Comedy concerning a famous female singer who ends up staying incognito in the mountains for some time, with songs of said singer being broadcast on the radio.
  • The Wonder Years is reasonably seen as a Spiritual Successor to the movie Stand by Me, both coming-of-age tales about boys on the cusp of adolescence, with voice-overs by the adult versions of the protagonists.
    • It's also seen as a successor to A Christmas Story.
    • And don't forget Boy Meets World which stars Ben Savage, the younger brother of Fred Savage, who was the main character in The Wonder Years, though without the voice-overs but similar concept.
    • Everybody Hates Chris could be seen as the African-American version of The Wonder Years.
    • Don't forget The Sandlot, either.

    X 
  • The 1980 musical film Xanadu is a spiritual successor to the 1944 movie Cover Girl. In Xanadu, Gene Kelly plays an older version of Danny Mcguire (his character in Cover Girl). His character doesn't make any direct references to the story or characters in the older movie except for the mention of once owning a nightclub. Danny also remembers meeting Kira before somehow. Rita Hayworth's role in the older film doesn't really suggest any connections to Kira or the muses. But In the 1947 film Down to Earth (the direct inspiration for Xanadu), Hayworth actually does play the muse "Terpsichore". And Down to Earth does make references to Cover Girl, however.

    Y 

    Z 
  • Zathura to Jumanji — both feature a differently-themed board game (space and the jungle, respectively) that brings those elements to life, often to the danger of the players, who are aided by a grown up player who's been trapped inside the game for years. Incidentally, the original Zathura book was a direct sequel to Jumanji.
  • Zookeeper to Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
  • Zoolander, about a vapid male model who gets caught up in a conspiracy by international terrorists, can easily be seen as a stealth adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama, except Played for Laughs. Apparently, Ellis agreed and considered suing Ben Stiller over it, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement on the matter.

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