10 Ripped Off Characters Movies Didn't Even Try To Hide

This one isn’t an entire film populated with rip-off characters and, unlike a lot of this list, the knock-off isn’t central to the plot, but it’s nonetheless worth noting thanks to the sheer shamelessness of its creators.

Michael Bay isn’t, admittedly, a director beloved for his originality, but 2007 saw the helmer surprise critics with a funny, likeable coming-of-age Transformers adaptation largely carried by Shia LaBoeuf’s performance. The sequel inevitably escalated the stakes at the cost of quiet character beats, reducing a fun summer blockbuster to a parade of explosions and leg-humping robots (yes, really).

It was inevitable that a film this messy would have too many racist robot caricatures for every critique to get an airing, but few reviewers noted how blatantly an early scene ripped off James Cameron’s classic Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

When our hero Sam Witwicky manages to pull a cute coed despite doing nothing to win her affections, it’s pretty obvious something strange is afoot, and indeed moments later said coed is revealed to be a robot in disguise—specifically a robot disguised as a human, who melts into shards of shiny metal to reconstruct herself.

It’s a set up that will sound familiar to fans of Robert Patrick’s implacable T-1000, and it’ll sound egregiously out-of-place when we note that there are no human Transformers in the franchise until this scene, and none appear—or are even alluded to—for the rest of the film.