You've probably seen The Fast and the Furious, right? It's about an undercover cop who bonds with a criminal and ends up letting him escape at the end, which is also the precise shell plot of the Keanu Reeves-starring actioner Point Break, which hit cinemas a whole decade before. What about The Hunger Games? The movie with the kids being forced to kill one another, yeah? You may or may not be aware that it's eerily similar to the Japanese movie Battle Royale, in which, you guessed it, a group of kids are forced to slaughter one another (albeit with far more gore). It's a common complaint among film buffs that originality is dead in Hollywood: everything's either a sequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation, and finding original scripts is an increasingly challenging task. Some screenwriters are a little more sneaky, though, and will essentially remake or rehash a classic idea with a slightly different spin in order to avoid needing to pay rights - or deal with the thorny legal issues involved in a remake. These 15 upcoming movies, from novel adaptations to sports movies, creepy thrillers, off-the-wall comedies and so on, feel undeniably indebted to previous movies, be they released just a short time ago or in decades past...
15. Goosebumps Rips Off... Jumanji
The Original Movie: Two siblings discover and play with a magical board game, which releases a man, Alan Parrish (Robin Williams), who has been trapped inside it for over 25 years. Though each roll of the dice potentially unleashes more havoc into the real world (namely a stampede of animals), the only way to put Jumanji to bed is to keep playing and finish the game. The Ripoff: A teenage boy, Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette), moves to a new town and meets his new neighbour, Hannah (Odeya Rush), who just so happens to be the teenage daughter of Goosebumps author R. L. Stine (Jack Black). Zach investigates Stine's manuscript collection, causing the monsters contained within to be released into the real world, at which point Zach, Hannah and Stine have to team up to restore the creatures to where they belong. Sure, Goosebumps has been around for a long time in its own right with its own immense legacy, but it's hard to separate this movie premise, which attempts to incorporate a large number of Goosebumps stories into one film, from the "board game comes alive" concept of Jumanji.