3. The Terminator (1984)
It's Incredibly Similar To... "Soldier" - The Outer Limits (1964)
The Terminator tells the classic story of a walking robot death machine that travels from the future and into the past with a single objective: murder the mother of future human resistance leader John Connor, who will cause a lot of trouble for sentient robots if he lives. To counter this movie, the humans also get a bit time travel-y, in the sense that they send back their own man, Kyle Reese, to face off against the Terminator (that's Arnie, in case for some reason you just came out of a coma today and you're easing yourself back into society via this list). James Cameron was the guy who came up with this wacky premise, of couse, and you'd presume he'd have done that using his own thoughts and his own brain. Not according to sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison, though, who - in this article's only instance of somebody
actually getting sued - took out a lawsuit against Cameron because he thought that the writer/director had stolen the movie's premise from an episode of then
The Outer Limits. The episode in question is called "Soldier," in case you feel like checking it out and you're really, really bored. Ellison thought that the plot of "Soldier" (which featured a man going back in time, shacking up with a family, and facing off against another time-travelling enemy later on) was too similar to that of
The Terminator, and there's no denying that there are similarities, especially since the main character sacrifices himself like Reese does to save somebody. "Demon With A Hand" was another story that Cameron also apparently copied at one time, but Ellison later stated that he only thought the director had plagiarised "Soldier." He won the lawsuit.