Follow the Leader/Film

The massive success of Batman Begins and Casino Royale, Darker and Edgier reboots of worn-out franchises led to a trend of failed or declining franchises being rebooted with varying degrees of success.
The ultimate example, perhaps, is Star Wars, which launched the science-fiction craze of the late 1970s/early 1980s. It opened the door for expensive fantasy/science fiction movies, and is credited with changing the way big blockbusters are viewed by Hollywood, but most of them were shallow attempts to cash in.
- Star Wars is also the reason that Moonraker was made when it was. Originally (in 1977) the next James Bond movie after The Spy Who Loved Me was supposed to be For Your Eyes Only, and indeed the closing credits of the former explicitly state this. The success of Star Wars changed this, and the 'spacey' movie was made. It was mediocre at best, so the next film was far more down-to-earth.
- This is also the reason that Star Trek: Phase Two, a new show that would take up from where Star Trek: The Original Series left off, was cancelled in favor of big-screen Star Trek films.
  - What's especially amusing about Phase Two is that the Redesigned Enterprise was initially designed by the same people who worked on the designs in Star Wars, and thus looked like some unholy fusion of the Enterprise and a star destroyer, before star wars was even made.
- You know what? Let's just list the works that either ripped off Star Wars or were made because of it: The Black Hole, Battle Beyond the Stars, Battlestar Galactica, "Turkish Star Wars", Message from Space, Starcrash, Eragon, Krull... the list goes on. And on. AND ON.
- The original Star Wars film itself drew from many sources. The Hidden Fortress connection is well known. The Dune-Tattooine inspiration is pretty obvious. You can tell George Lucas must have seen at least Space Battleship Yamato episodes 26, 1, and 8, in that order, so we can probably pin his famous trip to Japan down to early 1975, when the series went into reruns. Isaac Asimov noticed some similarity to his Foundation series but didn't take it personally. As Wilson Mizner observed, stealing from everybody is just called "research."
- The Empire Strikes Back spawned the astonishingly overused cliché of how the villain is the hero's father. The reason it worked in that film was because there was so much talk about Luke's father that the reveal was so surprising and ironic at the time. Nowadays, many writers seem to just throw it in with very little foreshadowing and buildup that it is met with little surprise at the reveal.
- Empire also spawned some trends regarding how sequels are made. At the time, the expectation for any sequel was that it would just rehash the first film, a trend which is sadly still pretty common. Thus, it was rather shocking to have a sequel in which The Bad Guy Wins and the story concludes with a Cliff Hanger. Nowadays, it's downright expected that the second installment of any franchise will end with a cliffhanger, particularly if a third installment is guaranteed. Another trend started by Empire is making the sequel Darker and Edgier in order to keep the premise fresh, which is seen in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Two years before that, Jaws begat the concept of the Summer Blockbuster, along with a slew of "animals attack" movies; one of the first and best copiers was Alligator.
- Spielberg's first movie Duel, while not as influential, has inspired a few ripoffs as well; the recent video-release Joy Ride: Dead Ahead was painfully blatant in its copying.
Anybody notice how after The Blair Witch Project, horror movies started having characters with a camera or web connection? Examples: Cloverfield, Quarantine, Diary of the Dead, etc.
- This also bled down to TV shows like Firefly and the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
- For that matter, it inspired the Web Original series Marble Hornets, which has itself inspired a bevy of imitators.
Top Gun led to several imitators, from Iron Eagle to the short-lived TV series Supercarrier, as well as a mini-boom of air-combat video games.
Friday the 13th initiated the 1980s' slasher genre; the film was itself preceded by Halloween. Later, Scream re-invigorated the genre; among the works that came in its wake were Halloween H2O and Freddy vs. Jason.
The Disaster Movie craze in the 1970s featured such works as The Towering Inferno, The China Syndrome, and Airport. This only ended with the release of Airplane!, a parody that meant such films couldn't be taken seriously anymore. (That's how you know your parody was successful... when you kill your entire targeted genre.)
- Then the Disaster Movie craze made a brief comeback with Twister, Armageddon/Deep Impact and Volcano/Dantes Peak, and a whole slew of mediocre Skiffy movies about earthquakes and volcanoes and killer storms in unlikely or odd locations.
The success of X-Men, followed by the great success of the Spider-Man film franchise, unleashed a deluge of Superhero-inspired live-action movies upon the world that hasn't let up yet (and probably won't, thanks to the runaway critical and commercial success of Iron Man and The Dark Knight Saga).
Jacques-Yves Cousteau's The Silent World became the nature documentary all other nature documentaries would imitate.
The nature documentary March of the Penguins led to two animated features with penguin characters: Happy Feet and Surf's Up. Both were in production long before March of the Penguins was released (that being the nature of feature-quality animation of either kind), but the success of March probably got them slightly more publicity for getting on the "penguin bandwagon".
Dark City (1998) created a wave of dark, philosophical Science Fiction movies that question the nature of reality and have lots of John Woo-style gunplay. It was The Matrix that became the most successful and iconic of these films, even though it was not the first. Other examples include eXistenZ, The 13th Floor, and Equilibrium.
- The Matrix brought Cyberpunk into the mainstream during the late 1990s, when the genre was already almost dead in Sci-Fi literature, and spawned a multitude of movies and video games which mostly imitated its cinematic style and Bullet Time CGI effects.
  - Supposedly, when the Wachowskis were peddling their script, they brought with them a comic book and told prospective buyers that they wanted to do something like that into a movie. The comic in question? Ghost in The Shell.
- More broadly, Dark City seems to have been the advance guard of a rash of films in 1998-1999 of varying genres involving a closed or false reality. Non-action examples would be Pleasantville, The Truman Show and maybe even Being John Malkovich. These existed alongside science-fiction titles like eXistenZ and The Matrix. This may have simply been the spirit of the age, however, and not strictly an example of this trope.
- Most Cyberpunk movies owe debts of gratitude to Blade Runner (the "real world") and Tron (Cyberspace)
- As far as stylistic precedents for The Matrix go, see also Event Horizon and the movie version of Lost in Space.
The twin successes of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are leading to more and more film adaptations of epic literary fantasy, varying from the relatively good The Chronicles of Narnia, to Eragon, which somehow managed to make even less sense than the book on which it was based. His Dark Materials and The Dark Is Rising have been released, but neither did very well.
- The 2010 film version of Alice in Wonderland turns a surrealist parody of Victorian society and literature into a straightforward fantasy epic.
- It even moved to TV with George R. R. Martin's adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones on HBO. (This should not be considered a step down; the series' showrunners thought about trying to do movies, but realized that compressing GRRM's Doorstoppers would be "an act of vandalism." A good call when your shortest book is only thirty pages shorter than the longest Harry Potter novel.)
Shaft became the model of a film genre for movies targeted towards urban African Americans now otherwise known as Blaxploitation. It also owed a lot to Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which wasn't quite an exploitation film.
There was a genre (Our Man Flint, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Modesty Blaise, Austin Powers, Spy Hard, Johnny English, etc) parodying spy movies in and/or of the 1960s... except that they only ever seem to parody James Bond. It's as if other spy fiction simply didn't exist, although they don't really need to parody those: the general public know about James Bond most and the Bond movies created or standardised enough tropes by themselves. What made it rather odd is the James Bond series already started out pretty tongue in cheek.
Gladiator re-started the Historical Epic genre of things like Ben-Hur. Russell Crowe's powerful performance, the high budget settings, and gritty action caught something in the audience that studios have attempted to imitate with films such as Troy, Alexander, and most recently, Three Hundred.
- While obviously different from other historical epics, films like Gangs of New York also owe a lot to Gladiator, both stylistically and in getting the execs to actually greenlight the massive budgets they needed. Some of these have garnered successes in their own light, not as imitations but as part as a new wave of Epic films.
Soft on Demand, a somewhat infamous Japanese adult video company, created a small series of films called Zenra -X-, where Zenra is the Japanese word for Nude, and -X- is some random everyday activity or sport -- for example, Zenra Volleyball, Zenra Cross-town Bus Tour, Zenra Officework, Zenra Orchestra, etc. These films were successful enough and mimicked enough that Zenra has become a genre of Japanese pornography, dedicated to pointless nudity, with little to no sex, and occasional plots. It helps that the Soft on Demand company doesn't take themselves at all seriously.
George Romero's Night of the Living Dead started the trend, which was then unofficially spun off with Return of the Living Dead which then opened the floodgates to the Zombie Apocalypse genre. There had been previous zombie films like I Walked With A Zombie, White Zombie, and arguably The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but these had only one or two zombies each, and no apocalypse.
- Except for Invisible Invaders, which does feature a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Night of the Living Dead may have been the first real zombie film, but there were only a few imitators after it, like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and the Spanish Tombs of the Blind Dead series. What really set off the zombie film craze was the release of Romero's later Dawn of the Dead and the Italian-made Zombi 2 (Dawn of the Dead was called Zombi in Italy).
The Kentucky Fried Movie inspired a host of movies, most of them largely forgettable, that consisted of largely unrelated sketches made up mostly of pop culture parodies and pastiches.
- The first Scary Movie led to a couple crappy spoof flicks by Seltzer and Friedberg such as Date Movie and Epic Movie.
The success of the Saw franchise (at least the first movie) sparked a rash of torture horror movies, such as Hostel, Turistas, and most recently Vacancy.
Syfy has a tendency to release a cheap knockoff version of whatever hot movie is in theaters.
Following the blockbuster success of Titanic, several other movies were made about the Titanic and shipwrecks in general to try to follow in its footsteps. Including an atrocious Disneyesque cheapass cartoon movie with singing animals.
- Actually, there were two cheapass cartoon movies with singing animals. Which just goes to show, some people will try to Disneyfy anything.
- Pearl Harbor was also a pretty blatant attempt to recapture the tragic-love-amid-larger-historical-tragedy magic that made Titanic so many gazillions.
Pearl Harbor was also part of a glut of World War II films released after the success of Saving Private Ryan, including Enemy at the Gates, Hart's War, The Last Raid, U-571, Windtalkers and others.
Alien has had a lot of "More Teeth Than the Osmond Family" monster movies after it.
- Then again, it's unlikely that Alien would have been fast-tracked into production if not for the success of Star Wars, proving that this trope isn't necessarily a bad thing.
- It also repopularized the Face Full of Alien Wingwong, which would often be done in a more literal way.
- The Nostromo's set design also heavily influenced SF movies and TV series with grungy, industrial Used Future settings: Saturn 3, Outland and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (both directed by Peter Hyams), the Vogon ship in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series, Aliens (not surprising, being a sequel), Red Dwarf after the first two seasons, the interiors of Borg ships in Star Trek, Event Horizon, and the first Cube movie.
M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense inspired many movies that completely ignored quality, fun, action and plot, instead focusing on some supernatural twist. They ranged from good to bad to terrible. Unusually, Shyamalan himself seems to have been the main exponent of this trend.
A wave of Japanese horror movie remakes began with The Ring. Examples include The Ring 2, The Grudge 1 and 2, and One Missed Call.
- Shutter even tries to look like a Japanese remake (the original was Thai, by the way).
After films like Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and especially The Sound of Music hit the big time at the mid-1960s box-office, big studios fast-tracked a ton of big-budget movie musicals. While one, Oliver!, was successful enough to win the 1968 Best Picture Oscar, and Funny Girl launched Barbra Streisand's movie career, changing audience tastes doomed the vast majority of them to significant financial losses. The genre limped through the 1970s and quietly died in the early 1980s (with a mini-revival by way of the Disney Animated Canon in the 90s). Only in recent years has the genre become respectable again, and it's still not particularly profitable (in America anyway - the story is a bit different overseas, with Mamma Mia! outperforming The Dark Knight Saga in several countries, notably Britain).
- Moulin Rouge (2001) revived this trend, making way for films such as Chicago, Rent, Across the Universe, Mamma Mia!, and Nine.
The success of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction led to a glut of similarly stylistic and flashy Crime Dramas in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Emulated features including nonlinear timelines, amoral-yet-cool gangsters, gritty violence mixed with humor, and snappy dialogue about seemingly trivial subjects. Films include Two Days In The Valley, Suicide Kings, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and Lucky Number Slevin.
Willis O'Brien's version of The Lost World invented the notion of a giant monster rampaging through a city, which O'Brien later did again with King Kong. The Japanese Godzilla and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, with effects by O'Brien's protege, Ray Harryhausen, took the next step by linking the monster to the nuclear bomb. Them added the final touch of casting giant insects as the menace, leading to a wave of imitators all throughout The Fifties such as Beginning of the End, Tarantula, and Earth vs. the Spider.
- Also, the success of Godzilla led to many different monster movies all across Asia, including Pulgasari (an obscure North Korean film about a monster made of rice that comes to life and eats metal commissioned by none other than Kim Jong-Il himself), Yongary, Gorgo (which was actually made in Britain and featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000), and everyone's favorite flying turtle. The genre was recently started up again with Peter Jackson's King Kong remake, and subsequently revamped with South Korea's |The Host, which was followed by Cloverfield.
After The Dark Knight Saga hit the box offices running, Warner Brothers executives have decided to revamp another of their classic characters in a darker, edgier way. Who is it? Superman.
The smashing successes of The Flintstones and Casper led to a string of live action adaptations based on older cartoons such as George of the Jungle, Mr. Magoo, Inspector Gadget, Dudley Do Right, Rocky and Bullwinkle, |Scooby Doo, Garfield, Fat Albert, Underdog, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Marmaduke, Yogi Bear, and The Smurfs all of which are very horrible for cartoon fans.
The success of Transformers (2007) caused studios to greenlight Remake and Revival projects from older series such as Speed Racer, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, G.I. Joe, Robotech, Voltron, and Knight Rider. Star Trek is also a part of this trend, "rebooting" the Original Series with a style and mood more reminiscent of the "Revival" flicks than other films in the Trek franchise.
There's been a trend in size changing/giant/tiny movies since about 2008. We've had The Ant Bully and Bee Movie, then Monsters vs. Aliens, and then we have Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Ant-Man, and Gulliver's Travels.
The Mockbusters. Most notably The Asylum's productions. King of the Lost World is a particularly notable knock-off of King Kong, Lost, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (and/or The Lost World). Notably BAD.
- And when Terminator: Salvation came out, they released a movie called...The Terminators.
The massive success of Shaun of the Dead has led other films, such as Severance and Lesbian Vampire Killers, to try and mix comedy and horror. Quality ranges from alright to bad. But one thing is certain: all of these films will be promoted as the best comedy horror since Shaun of the Dead.
The massive popularity of Bruce Lee after his tragic passing led to a peculiar phenomenon known as "Brucesploitation", in which various Hong Kong studios made movies starring Bruce Lee imitators with titles like Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave and The Clones of Bruce Lee. The fad eventually died out when none of the imitators were as successful as the original, though one of them, Cheng Long, would later go on to greater fame by pioneering his own unique, often-imitated, never-duplicated style of martial arts film. You might know him as Jackie Chan.
After The Exorcist made boatloads of money for Warner Bros., the rest of the '70s saw a veritable flood of horror movies based around children: The Omen, The Other, Audrey Rose, etc. Many of its successors (such as The Sentinel) also chose to imitate its preoccupation with the symbolism and aesthetics of the Catholic church, as opposed to the scary-little-kid formula; in fact, any horror movie over the last forty or so years that relies heavily on Catholic iconography could be said to be following in The Exorcist's footsteps.
Imitators of 2001: A Space Odyssey: Solaris (original and remake), Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Contact, Mission to Mars, Sunshine, WALL-E, Moon. However, 2001's sequel 2010 tried to avoid imitating it as much as possible.
- Star Wars is as far away from an imitator of 2001 as you can get, but John Dykstra continued to use 2001's style of lighting and detailing spacecraft on Star Wars, and from there it became the standard way to depict spacecraft in all of visual science fiction.
- The book of Solaris though was written 7 years before 2001 came out, and featured themes like inexplicable aliens, almost empty space stations, and isolation from other humans.
The success of Die Hard prompted a slew of action set pieces best described as Die Hard on an X. Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege, Speed 2), Die Hard on a plane (Passenger 57, Executive Decision) and so on.
Star Trek: The Original Series and Lost in Space both trod heavily, in their different ways, in the footsteps of Forbidden Planet.
And it cannot be a coincidence that Doctor Who debuted on TV only a couple of years after George Pal's film version of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine won an Oscar.
The 2005 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie vehicle Mr. and Mrs. Smith jump-started a series of fairly mediocre "my loved one is a secret agent and/or assassin" films and as of 2010, critics agree it's been beaten to death.
- Older Than They Think: these were preceded in the 90s by True Lies (James Cameron directs Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eliza Dushku, amongst others), which itself is an English remake of the French comedy La totale.
Every few years or so, when a movie shown in 3D becomes a hit, many movies after that will premiere in 3D. The most recent example is Avatar. Quality varies on these films. Some movies will be truly enhanced by 3D, others will look nice but can do without it, and others just don't work in 3D. Avatar, which started the latest 3D movement, was considered by many to look better in 3D. The film version of How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind were considered by some critics, notably Roger Ebert, to look nice, but could work just fine without it. And rushed 3D conversions to cash in this trope (3D tickets are more expensive and thus profitable), such as Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender, weren't well-received, with the latter even receiving complaints that the botched 3D only made a bad movie worse.
Little Miss Badass: Started with Hitgirl in Kick-Ass, grew up a bit for Sucker Punch, and becomes particularly lethal in Hanna. And then there's Katniss from The Hunger Games.
In the wake of the mega-grossing Alice in Wonderland and to a lesser extent the success of Wicked (both book and stage musical), a glut of Fairy Tale-based film projects were greenlit, often with a Darker and Edgier take promised. The Onion's A.V. Club has been busy snarking all of them under its Newswire banner.
- There's going to be two versions of Snow White! Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman.
- A film entitled Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters has been announced for 2012.
- This might have also caused the creation of the new TV shows Grimm and Once Upon a Time.
Does anyone get the sense that The Three Musketeers 2011 is trying to rip off Pirates of the Caribbean? Swashbuckling, political intrigues, naval combat (grafted on to Musketeers by adding airships), and Orlando Bloom?
- More like POTC meets [insert Milia Jovovich action film here].
The success of Sherlock Holmes (which might've been preceded by From Hell) led to similar steampunk-ish disturbed detective works like Poe where Edgar Allen himself helps solve murders based on his stories, and a version of Robin Hood where the sheriff of Nottingham is pursuing a murderous archer he discovers that Robin was framed and the two bring down the real murderer. Unfortunately that story was too different and what we got was Ridley Scott's Robin Hood 2010.
Love Actually -> Valentines Day -> New Year's Eve. Love Actually is a British Romantic Comedy with an all star ensemble cast about various couples in love. Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve the same thing, only revolving around a holiday and with a lot more A-list stars.
The success of the Twilight films spawned a number of paranormal teen romances, including a reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood, a film version of I Am Number Four, and the 2010 version of The Wolf Man.
- It may have also helped bring The Hunger Games to the silver screen as that series was endorsed by Stephenie Meyer.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides features an interspecies romance that features several closeups of long, lingering gazes reminiscent of the Twilight films.
The success of teen/children's book adaptations lately has resulted in a bevy of films coming out based on such books like Harry Potter and Twilight but also Percy Jackson and The Olympians, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, War Horse, The Hunger Games, and more are on the way.
The success of Dolphin Tale results with some more inspiring movies about animals such as the aforementioned War Horse, as well as Big Miracle.
The success of The Notebook led to many more romantic movies about The Power of Love, most of them also based on books by Nicholas Sparks.
The 1994 movie Camp Nowhere follows the Summer Campy formula of Meatballs, as well as the then-recent success of the "unsupervised children" genre invented by the Home Alone franchise. Likewise, the 1995 movie Heavyweights followed in the footsteps of both Camp Nowhere and Meatballs.
After the movie Project X came out, real life teens spread the news about their own Project X parties on social networking sites, with over 2000 people showing up to most of them. Two of these parties ended in violent shootings. Oddly enough, one teen got a job offer out of it because of his marketing skills.
For all the criticisms of the movie, along with it being seen as the beginning of the end of the Disney Renaissance, Disney's Hercules film in 1997 arguably caused an explosion of popular culture focusing on Greek myth, and to a lesser degree, other ancient cultures like Egypt and the Norse, through the rest of the 1990s and the 2000s, before it ended in the early 2010s.