Recycled In Space / Live-Action Films

aka: Live Action Film

• Airplane II: The Sequel is Airplane! IN SPACE! Ironically, it had a lot of recycled jokes. He's the Big Cheese, the Man in Charge... Lampshaded when Elaine said "Ted, I have the feeling we've been through this exact thing before."
• Alien:
  • The original film is a haunted house horror story…IN SPACE!
  • Aliens is Rambo: First Blood Part II IN SPACE! (helps James Cameron wrote both) Or as the producers summed up, The Vietnam War IN SPACE!
  • The Alien vs. Predator films inverted the usual order. While the Alien films are all set in space sometime in the future, the first Alien vs. Predator was set in Mysterious Antarctica in The Present Day, while the sequel, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, was set in small-town Colorado immediately after the events of the first. (They weren't an example for the Predator series, though, as those films were already set on Earth in the present day.)
• The Syfy Channel Original Movie Antibody is Fantastic Voyage as a Post-9/11 Terrorism Movie!
• Apocalypse Now is Heart of Darkness IN 1969 VIETNAM AND CAMBODIA!
• Apollo 18 is The Blair Witch Project ON THE MOON!
• The Apple is the Book of Revelation AS A MUSICAL IN A 1970s DISCO-ERA FUTURE WORLD! AND ON DRUGS!
• Avatar is Pocahontas/Dances with Wolves/Princess Mononoke/FernGully: The Last Rainforest IN SPACE!
  • Or Dune on a Jungle Planet.
  • Avatar: The Way of Water is the first Avatar UNDER THE SEA!
• The Banana Splits Movie is Five Nights at Freddy's ON THE SET OF A CHILDREN'S TV SHOW!
• Barbie (2023) is The LEGO Movie WITH BARBIE CHARACTERS!
• Battle Beyond the Stars is The Magnificent Seven IN SPACE (which in turn is Seven Samurai IN THE WILD WEST!)
• In one of his Q&A specials, Kevin Smith mentioned being offered a script for Beetlejuice goes Hawaiian in the '90s. To which his response was, "Really? Didn't we say all we had to say with the first one?"
• Black Friday (2021) is Slither ON BLACK FRIDAY!
• Bones & All is Badlands WITH CANNIBALISM!
• Bumblebee is The Iron Giant WITH TRANSFORMERS!
• Centurion is Cross of Iron WITH ROMAN LEGIONNARIES!
• Inverted by Child's Play 2. The first film took place in the city (specifically Chicago), an unusual setting for most slashers, while the second film had a more conventional Stepford Suburbia setting akin to Halloween (1978). Then Child's Play 3 played it straight, serving as Child's Play IN MILITARY SCHOOL! Seed of Chucky, meanwhile, was Child's Play IN HOLLYWOOD!
• Chocolat is arguably Footloose WITH CHOCOLATE!
• Clueless is Emma IN A MODERN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL!
• The Country Bears is The Blues Brothers WITH COUNTRY MUSIC AND BEARS! and without swearing.
• Critters eventually went (back) to space too. In fact, almost any horror movie franchise will eventually head to the stars if it lasts long enough. (Except for Alien, as noted above.)
• Curse of the Golden Flower is the 1934 play Thunderstorm IN THE CHINESE IMPERIAL COURT!
• Dead Birds has more or less the same premise as Scarecrows, but is set in The American Civil War and uses quite a bit more exposition on the house's history.
• The Deserter is The Dirty Dozen in The Wild West!
• Diner is I Vitelloni IN 1959 BALTIMORE!
• Django Unchained is basically The Boondocks episode "The Story of Catcher Freeman" AS A LIVE-ACTION MOVIE!
• Dracula 3000 is Dracula IN SPACE!
  • Dracula 2000 is Dracula IN THE PRESENT DAY BEFORE THAT CONCEPT HAD BEEN RUN INTO THE GROUND!
• Eastern Condors is The Dirty Dozen in The Vietnam War! With added martial arts!
• Emmanuelle had a literal case in the American series Emmanuelle In Space.
• The Emperor of Paris is The Untouchables IN NAPOLEONIC ERA PARIS!
• Escape from L.A. is much more like a remake of Escape from New York IN LOS ANGELES than a sequel.
• Event Horizon is Hellraiser IN SPACE! At least when it's not a spiritual prequel to Warhammer 40,000.
  • Event Horizon is The Black Hole WITH A HARD "R" RATING!
  • Similarly, Ghost Ship is Event Horizon AT SEA!
• The Fast and the Furious is Point Break (1991) WITH STREET RACING!
• A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing are two different versions of Yojimbo IN THE OLD WEST!
  • And Yojimbo itself is more-or-less Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest IN FEUDAL JAPAN!
  • When The Raven Flies by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson (Hrafninn flýgur, 1984) is Yojimbo WITH VIKINGS!
• Forbidden Planet is The Tempest IN SPACE!
• Fortress 2: Re-entry is Fortress (1992) IN SPACE!
• Every film in the Friday the 13th series from the sixth one on used some kind of gimmick.
  • After Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning infuriated fans with its twist that "Jason Voorhees" was actually a Jack the Ripoff this time, while setting up Tommy Jarvis as a new villain, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives retconned it and brought Jason back full-stop. The fact that Jason was seemingly Killed Off for Real in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was no obstacle; one lightning bolt was all it took to make it Friday the 13th WITH A ZOMBIE JASON! All the later films in the original series kept Jason as a zombie, growing progressively more rotten with each one. And yes, the obvious joke about the series going on long after it should've died has been made, many times.
  • In Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, it wasn't Jason who was subject to the gimmick, but the Final Girl Tina, who had telekinetic powers and was based heavily off of Carrie White. The resulting movie is often described by fans as an unofficial "Friday the 13th MEETS CARRIE!"
  • Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was Friday the 13th IN NEW YORK! (Though only for the last third of the movie. Thanks to budget cuts, the first hour or so is set on a cruise ship heading from Crystal Lake to New York.)
  • Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is Friday the 13th WITH JASON AS A BODY-HOPPING DEMON!
  • The literal Friday the 13th IN SPACE! finally came with Jason X. Complete with Jason getting turned into a Cyborg "uber-Jason".
• Fury (2014) is Das Boot with ALLIED SOLDIERS in a TANK!
• Galaxy Quest is about as literal as it gets, being essentially ¡Three Amigos! IN SPACE! John Landis, who directed the latter, couldn't help calling the former out for being a shameless ripoff, but he also didn't mind much because he considered Galaxy Quest to be a good film in its own right. ^note The concept for Galaxy Quest has overlap with ¡Three Amigos!, but predating both is fan-fiction of the Star Trek cast being in that situation. It is possible John Landis was unaware of that, so no accusations are being made at him, but as Galaxy Quest is an Affectionate Parody of Star Trek, it owes much to that concept, in addition to whatever it owes to ¡Three Amigos!
• Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning is Ginger Snaps IN A 19TH CENTURY FUR TRADING POST!
• Gran Turismo is Speed Racer BASED ON GRAN TURISMO! AND ALSO BASED ON A TRUE STORY!
• Gremlins 2: The New Batch is Gremlins IN NEW YORK! AND WITH MUTANT GREMLINS!
• The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special was described as Dumb and Dumber IN SPACE! by Pom Klementieff.
• Gunmen is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly IN '90s SOUTH AMERICA!
• Hellraiser: Bloodline was Hellraiser in IN VICTORIAN FRANCE! and later IN SPACE!
• Parodied in History of the World Part I with JEWS IN SPACE!
• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was basically exactly the same movie as Home Alone, just set IN NEW YORK! Even the scary neighbor got a direct counterpart. This was lampshaded by Harry, who mentioned that Kevin threw two paint cans the last time they tried to climb up a flight of stairs, and saw it coming. Unfortunately for them, the second time around, a sewer pipe followed immediately afterward.
• How to Build a Better Boy is gender-flipped Weird Science FOR KIDS!
• The Hunger Games is Battle Royale WITH A PG-13 RATING! Not to forget the change in the cast's ethnicity from Japanese to white American.
• Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru is Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illych in post-war Japan. (As will be later seen below, Kurosawa's material has been very ripe for recycling.)
• Joysticks is Porky's IN A VIDEO ARCADE!
• Kamen Rider J is Ultraman AS A KAMEN RIDER SHOW!
• King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is The Lion King in the Medieval Times with Swords!
• Knightriders: According to an interview in American Film, George Romero was having trouble selling a picture about King Arthur, until he exclaimed "I bet if I put the knights ON MOTORCYCLES! and added a rock soundtrack, you'd be interested."
• A Knight's Tale is Rocky IN MEDIEVAL TIMES! AND WITH KNIGHTS!
• The Last House on the Left: The Virgin Spring (13th century Swedish ballad, dramatised by Ingmar Bergman in 1961) IN PRESENT DAY (1972) AMERICA!
• The Last Samurai is Dances with Wolves IN FEUDAL JAPAN!
• Lemonade Mouth is The Breakfast Club AS A CHILDREN'S MOVIE WITH A ROCK BAND!
• Leprechaun not only went the IN SPACE! route with its fourth installment (which was actually titled Leprechaun 4: In Space), it later went IN THE GHETTO! with the next film, Leprechaun in the Hood. This idea was apparently popular enough that they went back to that well for Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood a few years later.
• Lockout is Escape from New York IN SPACE!, to the point that John Carpenter successfully sued the film-makers for plagiarism in the French courts.
• Look Who's Talking Now is the first two movies in the series WITH DOGS INSTEAD OF BABIES!
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Peter Jackson's commentary revealed that he based his version of the Battle of Helm's Deep on the 1960s movie Zulu, depicting the Battle of Rorke's Drift where 139 British soldiers held off over 4,000 Zulu warriors during an twelve-hour siege.
• Machete originally ended with the narrator declaring "MACHETE WILL RETURN... IN... MACHETE KILLS! AND... MACHETE KILLS AGAIN!" During the runup to Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez claimed that the third movie had been retitled: "MACHETE KILLS AGAIN IN SPACE". A lot of people thought he was kidding. These people were wrong. The second movie opens with a ludicrous and clearly fake trailer for "Machete Kills Again in Space", and then ended with Machete actually pursuing the villain into space.
• The Magnificent Seven is Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai IN THE AMERICAN OLD WEST.
• Men in Black: The In-Universe description of the MIB's mission, monitoring and policing all alien activity on Earth, which acts as a galactic Truce Zone, is "Casablanca, except no Nazis.".
• The Mighty Ducks is The Bad News Bears ON ICE! Writer Steve Brill admitted in an interview with Time Magazine that the film was influenced by The Bad News Bears.
• Minority Report is like Mission: Impossible (1996), but it's in The Future! John Anderton gets framed for and "disavowed" for a murder he will commit, there's a "mole" in the Department of Precrime, an infiltration of the Department of Precrime akin to the "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop to steal a data collection, and Anderton is vindicated at the end of the film.
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is X-Men IN WORLD WAR II AND MADE BY TIM BURTON!
• The James Bond movie Moonraker is The Spy Who Loved Me IN SPACE! In turn, The Spy Who Loved Me was basically You Only Live Twice AT SEA! What makes this interesting is that all three of these movies were directed by the same person.
• The Muppets (2011) is Recess: School's Out AS A LIVE-ACTION MUSICAL MOVIE and WITH MUPPETS!
  • Muppets Most Wanted is Ernest Goes to Jail ON A WORLD TOUR!
• Now and Then is Stand by Me WITH GIRLS!
• "O" is Othello IN A MODERN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL!
• Outland is High Noon IN SPACE!
• Passengers (2016) is actually The Bible in space:
  • First, we have an Adam and Eve parallel, a guy wakes up as a result of an error (sin) alone on a spaceship. He immediately decides he doesn't want to be alone, so he wakes up another passenger Aurora.
  • Next, the ship is largely fleeing from issues in Earth is effectively Noah's ark, although the destruction of Earth is subverted quite a bit, since it is mainly a colony ship.
  • There are 5000 people on this ship, reminding the audience of the feeding of the 5000.
  • A minor detail, but the captain who is brought to fix things, has about 612 errors (representing the Jewish Law, and how the later writings called it a "curse") eventually resulting in his demise.
  • Lastly, there is a heroic sacrifice in order to save the 5000 (this one doesn't result in death, but it very nearly could have), which in turn restores the ship to an ideal state.
• The Patriot (2000) is Braveheart IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION!
• Preschool Musical On A Stick is A Muppet Family Christmas WITH SPROUT CHARACTERS and STICK PUPPETS!
• Predator is The Most Dangerous Game WITH AN ALIEN!
  • The Predator is Suicide Squad (2016) WITH YAUTJA!!
• Rags is a Gender Flip of Cinderella IN NEW YORK!
• Radio Rebel is Pump Up the Volume FOR KIDS!
• A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die! is The Dirty Dozen...in [[THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR!
• Rat Race is It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World IN THE EARLY AUGHTIES!
• Rebel Moon is A Bug's Life as a Space Opera. The main plot is about a villager seeking out warriors to help them fight off an invading force that wants to extort their people's food supply.
• R.I.P.D. is Men in Black In THE AFTERLIFE!
• Robin and the 7 Hoods is Robin Hood IN 1920s CHICAGO!
• The 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • There was also Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. which is Robinson Crusoe AS A FIGHTER PILOT!
• Rogue One is a War Movie IN SPACE! More specifically, a World War II movie A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR FAR AWAY!
• Run All Night is Road to Perdition IN MODERN DAY NEW YORK CITY!
• Scream:
  • Scream 3 is Scream IN HOLLYWOOD! It wasn't originally supposed to be, but it had to be completely and hastily rewritten post-Columbine after the original plot they came up with read a lot more uncomfortably in its wake, and setting it in Hollywood meant that they could easily film in their own backlots and offices.
  • Happens In-Universe in Scream 4, where it's mentioned that, within the Stab series (the Scream series' in-universe version of itself), Stab 5 somehow incorporated a Time Travel plot. No further elaboration is given on where or when the characters traveled to, but in keeping with both the Scream films' use of Meta Fiction and this trope's reputation as a gimmick for series that have jumped the shark, it's said to be the worst film in the series.
  • Scream VI is Scream IN NEW YORK!
• Shampoo is a Restoration Comedy IN 1968 BEVERLY HILLS!
• The Shape of Water is Creature from the Black Lagoon BUT THE ROMANCE IS MUTUAL!
• Sisu is John Wick IN WORLD WAR II!
• The 6th Day is Total Recall (1990) WITH CLONING!
• Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity is "The Most Dangerous Game" IN SPACE!
• Sneakerella is Rags BUT FOCUSED MORE ON STREET CULTURE!
• Solarbabies is Mad Max ON ROLLER SKATES!
• Spider-Man: Far From Home is National Lampoon's European Vacation IN THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE! AND IN REVERSE ORDER!
• The basic plot element of A New Hope is acknowledged to be Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress IN SPACE! Another acknowledged inspiration is The Vietnam War, making it the Vietnam War a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
  • George Lucas says in the commentary of A New Hope that the scenes where Luke is at home with his aunt and uncle are American Graffiti in space. Both deal with small town teenage boys on the night before they leave on a big adventure.
  • The Battle of Yavin, specifically the Death Star trench run, is The Dam Busters IN SPACE!
  • The general tone of Star Wars can essentially be described as High Fantasy IN SPACE!.
• The Stranger is Shadow of a Doubt WITH NAZIS!
• Summer Camp Nightmare is Lord of the Flies AT A SUMMER CAMP!
• A Taxi Driver is The Interview IN SOUTH KOREA! (South Korea wasn't very different from totalitarian, dictator-run North Korea back in 1980).
• Tenet is Primer AS AN ACTION MOVIE! The difference is, Tenet's turnstiles invert the causality of all objects that pass through them, and when they emerge they stay inverted, whereas Primer's boxes are force field generators that invert causality inside the field only so long as the field is active.
• 10 Things I Hate About You is The Taming of the Shrew IN AN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL!
• Threads is The Day After IN GREAT BRITAIN! AND MORE REALISTIC!
• 22 Jump Street ends with a series of increasingly silly sequel ideas (23 Jump Street: Medical School, 25 Jump Street: A Semester At Sea) before finally capping off with 2121 Jump Street: In Space. Fittingly, the actual proposed 23 Jump Street was initially planned as a crossover with Men in Black, titled MIB 23, though that idea appears to have fallen into Development Hell.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey tells you right in the title that it's The Odyssey IN SPACE! The main character's name is Bowman as an allusion to Odysseus owning a bow that only he can string, he defeats the Cyber Cyclops HAL 9000 (in the original draft, HAL was named Athena after Odysseus' patron goddess), and he's the only member of his crew to return home, but changed by the experience.
• Underwater is Alien Under the Sea!
• Utøya: July 22 is Cloverfield BASED ON A REAL SHOOTING!
• Venom (2018) is Little Shop of Horrors but without the songs and a black slimy alien instead of a green botanical one!
• The Warriors is Xenophon's Anabasis IN NEW YORK CITY!
• When the Bough Breaks is Obsessed with the crazy chick is pregnant!
• '90s Fox miniseries White Dwarf is an almost scene-by-scene remake of Kurosawa's Red Beard, with an added conspiracy subplot, IN SPACE.
• The film White Squall is Dead Poets Society on a boat.
• Willy's Wonderland is Five Nights at Freddy's WITH AN ACTION HERO JANITOR WHO FIGHTS THE ANIMATRONICS!
• The Wizard is Rain Man WITH NINTENDO VIDEO GAMES!
• Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo is Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest IN FEUDAL JAPAN!
• Zathura is Jumanji IN SPACE! Literally; in the story (by the same author) on which it is based, Zathura is the value-added bonus game on the reverse side of the Jumanji board (in the same way many checkerboards have a backgammon board on the back).
• Z-O-M-B-I-E-S is High School Musical WITH ZOMBIES!

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