Ever sat in the cinema watching a film and got the distinct feeling you've seen it all before? On top of franchising whatever property they can, Hollywood's a sucker for riding a trend. Or rather, making a trend after one film's rather successful. When a film proves to be popular studios will try their absolute best to try and get ahold a little bit of that magic, leading to a bunch of copycats that try to derive a formula from a one-off hit. And when you're dealing with absolutely massive movies, some of the biggest of all time, the imitations are only going to be more prolific. Naturally it's not always going to work; a big film tends to succeed down to many reasons, many of them unreplicable contextual factors. Today we take a look at ten films that were so damn big that just about every other film tried to copy from them. Some of the imitators ended up being enjoyable in their own right (heck some of them films themselves are guilty of riding a wave created by others), but with most its hard to get past that unshakable feeling they're desperate cash-grabs.
Honourable Mention - X-Men
In 2000 the evolution of film leaped forward. Treating its comic source with the upmost sincerity, Bryan Singer's X-Men showed the world how superhero movies could be more than genre pieces or toy commercials. But while it proved influential very little of the film itself was actually imitated; the majority of copying ends with the notion of a superhero blockbuster. Spider-Man et al merely used the success of X-Men as a jumping point, rather than trying to simply replicate it, so it can't legitimately be on the list (although it does deserve a mention).
