7 Movie Parodies That Somehow Happened For Real

6. Superhero Movie's Terminally Ill Villain Was Copied By The Amazing Spider-Man 2

At the height of the early-2000s parody boom, Superhero Movie was released - from Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin, no less - as a spoof of countless comic book films, most obviously Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man.

With that in mind, the villainous character of Lou Landers aka Hourglass (Christopher McDonald) was clearly modelled on Willem Dafoe's deliciously hammy Norman Osborn aka Green Goblin, albeit with a major revision.

In Spider-Man, Osborn simply performs experiments upon himself for the sake of scientific advancement and is accidentally driven insane, while in Superhero Movie, Landers is a mortally ill businessman who does so out of desperate necessity and similarly loses his mind.

Hilariously, the whole terminally ill tweak was then recycled for the rebooted Amazing Spider-Man franchise, where in the second movie a dying Norman Osborn (now played by Chris Cooper) is driven mad by his disease - though admittedly, he's a minor character in this instance.