8 Lazy Movies That Were Just Copying Better Films

2. It's The Unofficial Remake Of Rear Window - Disturbia

There was a time pre-meltdown when Shia LaBeouf looked set to be a major player in Hollywood. He'd come up through the Disney system with Even Stevens, but by the mid-naughties was ready to break out as his own man. However, long before he learned how to use copy and paste things were already looking shaky, with a string of questionable projects severely affecting the actor's credibility. Obviously chief among these was his lead role in the first three Transformers, a contractual obligation that endeared him to nobody, but Disturbia, which hit a couple of months before Michael Bay's first robo-explosion fest, didn't help.

Unable to leave his house, Shia finds himself bored witless so starts snooping on his neighbours, beginning to suspect one of them is a murderer. And no, we didn't accidentally get the synopsis of Rear Window mixed in there; Disturbia is just that similar. Coming from Dreamworks and Paramount, the latter of which used to have the rights to the Hitchcock classic, it's hard not to see it as a painfully thinly veiled remake. The filmmakers were keen to avoid this comparison. Probably due to the poor critical reception of the Michael Bay school of remakes, the furthest the cast and crew ever went was that the film was "inspired" in part by Rear Window. Yeah right.