10 Movies That Changed Other Movies

Denis Villeneuve's fantastic sci-fi thriller Arrival began shooting in June 2015, barely six months after the release of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, giving Arrival writer Eric Heisserer just enough time to appreciate a troubling similarity between his script and Nolan's story.

In an earlier draft of Arrival's script, the film's aliens provided humanity with the means to leave Earth in the future.

But after Heisserer saw Interstellar and recognised that it already engaged firmly with the idea of humanity's existence post-Earth, he rewrote the ending. In an interview with Collider, Heisserer said:

"I would say the only real significant change is the gift that the heptapods leave us with... In earlier versions, they were leaving sort of the blueprints to an interstellar ship, like an ark of sorts... And then Chris Nolan's Interstellar came out and all of us got together and said, 'Well this doesn't quite work now.' So we focused more on what we had there in front of us, which was the power of their language."

The timing here was crucial: had Arrival gone into production sooner or Interstellar been delayed, Heisserer and Villeneuve likely would've been unable to institute major changes.